The Lost Art of the Telephone Conversation — Here’s What Happened to It. Sheltering at Home Week 14

Sheltering at Home. June 18, 2020. Week 14

I know why young people do all that texting. And it’s not because they’re cool or tech-savvy or on-trend.

It’s because they want to have an actual conversation with their friends — and their cell phones don’t work: Dropped calls. Piercing static. Missing words. Missing sentences. Ambiguous tone of voice.

The 21st-century wireless telephone conversation is abysmally, embarrassingly unreliable.

That Guy Called — But What the Heck Did He Say?

Let’s say that guy from algebra class you have a crush on has called you on his cell phone, and it goes like this:

“Hi. I was wondering, would you like to [static]? Maybe you and [static] could [static].”

Now, if it was your mother calling, you could say, “Hey, Mom. You’re breaking up. Could you repeat that?” But it’s That Guy calling. You don’t want to embarrass/discourage/turn him off.

You say, “Sure. Yes,. You hope his next sentence will shed some light on the first.

It doesn’t. He says, “OK. I [static] you [static].

You decide you’d better text him. Make sure you know when and where this romantic assignation will take place

He texts you back. Turns out, he wants to copy your algebra homework.

And you just said yes to that.

The Mid-Century Teenage Phone Call

Mid-century teens were famous for their prolonged

telephone conversations on the family land line. Typically, there was only one phone line coming into the house, so the talky teen would get grief from sibs and parents who were expecting a phone call of their own. (There was no call waiting in those prehistoric days. Incoming callers got a busy signal.)

But teenagers talked. And they talked. And, to my mind, a lot of solid, healthy communication — conversation — got done while they were at it.  Their elders, meanwhile, fretted that all this telephoning would be the death of the fine art of letter writing.

(Would those elders be relieved know that, in some people’s opinion, texting and tweeting in the 21st century are causing a revival of the fine art of putting words down on, err . . .  screens?)

1950s Sweet Nothings

But back to the mid-century telephone conversation. Mid-century teens — because they were using wired landlines — could actually hear each other’s voices.

If sweet nothings were whispered into a 1950s handset, the sweet nothings traveled along miles and miles of wire and cable and arrived pretty much intact in the ear of the intended.

Fast-forward again to the present century. By the time my daughter and her brand-new boyfriend first met, young people of their generation had made the switch from telephone to smartphone. The landline was now a fusty old thing of the past, and few of my daughter’s friends bothered to even have one.

And so, when Christina and her new acquaintance got on the phone, it was not to talk, but to text.

And text and text. For days, the brand-new couple texted.

Young and Broke and Texting

At that point in her life, Christina’s cell phone was still on our shared family account. She was young, the Great Recession of 2008 had set her back, and we were still paying her phone bills.

It wasn’t long, then, before Jon and I got a message from the phone company: “You’ve been doing a lot of texting lately. Would you like to change your plan to include unlimited texts?”

We did.

Texting, apparently, was going to be a thing in our lives from now on. And so, we hoped, was that brand-new boyfriend.

Sheltering at Home Update: Where is all this pandemic Zooming and Skyping taking the art of the conversation? Will the written word give way once again to the spoken word — this time with eye contact thrown in? I’ll ask Grandchild No.1 the next time I Skype with her. She’s four years old. She’ll know.

More telephone history at “Telephoning Those Teenaged Babysitters — Rejected Again.”  Remember pay phones? Here’s one I spotted in Austin, Texas: “SXSW: Austin — A City With Its Soul on Its Sleeve.” More on the art of conversation at “Jury Duty Is an Exercise in Mindfulness.”