Culture, The Phone & The Telephone
Several years ago I was in a remote part of Kenya on a research project with the now defunct Pearson Peacekeeping Centre. We were being shown by the state police how locals used Twitter to text on their basic mobile phones. A lady had lost her cow that day. Via Twitter, someone in a nearby village sent her a message that they’d found her cow. This was very important for her in terms of income and family nutrition.
Mobile phones, especially smartphones (which are actually dumb, but that’s good), have impacted global culture and with the advances in various Artificial Intelligence tools, they’re set to have an even greater impact on global societies. It may well be that the combination of smartphones and AI will be where we see more societal change than through other digital technologies.
The mobile phone of today is rarely more than three feet, a metre, away from us. For many years they were quite literally attached at our hip. It was a social signal to have it on ones hip, mostly for men. That little flashing LED light indicating that you were important because people were contacting you. Social signals are an important part of human communication. Early smartphones, namely the now ancient Blackberry, were largely just phones and email devices. The iPhone changed all that and changed the very meaning of a phone and its role in society.
Phones, for nearly 100 years were largely fixed in place and they served one purpose. Talking to one another. In the early days of the telephone, when offices began to use them, there would be one phone in the office. One person was designated to answer it. When they did, everyone looked up and watched them. Awkweird.
Way back in 1877, perhaps before, songs were being written about the telephone. E.H. Harding published the song “The Telephone Polka” and right into the 1920s, songs about the telephone remained quite popular. One of the most famous telephone songs is “Jenny 8675309” from the 1980s. Phones continue to get mentioned today, often with references to social media apps, texting and messaging. An indicator of the evolution of the concept of the phone in society.
When a technology enters the aesthetic part of culture (arts, music, literature, fashion), it is the primary signal that a society has accepted and adopted that technology into its cultural code. We use the arts as a way of teaching a society what a technology means to us, how it can be used, social etiquette rules as well as the dangers and benefits. Aesthetics play an incredibly important role in cultural transmission. They are far more than just entertainment.
Aesthetics tell stories in various forms and stories have long been an important part of human existence. Rituals are another important aspect of cultural learning for technologies. Rituals are often conflated with being religious. They are not, and they are. We almost all have daily rituals, such as what we prefer to do when getting ready for bed or waking up in the morning.
Today, smartphones play a key role in daily rituals. You probably have a ritual around when you check your email, social media and messages. There’s a very good chance that your phone sits by your bedside overnight. You likely have your phone set up in a particular way to perform daily routines. Rituals.
And as you can see, I just toss out the word phone and in your mind, you don’t even think of it as a telephone, but as a core part of your daily life. You may well be reading this article on your phone, not your telephone.
Phones have become part of commerce as well. We buy and sell things on our phones, we send money to one another, we rarely need to go into a physical bank today. Our phones are becoming hubs to control things in our homes from heating to AC, music and lights and so on.
The phone has also become something that has altered our sense of time and place. In a way, the telephone did as well. We could talk across time zones and be in very different places. Our minds can do that. This is amplified through the phone of today. We can send a tweet and an entire conversation can happen while we go eat dinner with friends. This happens with anything we send, our minds are juggling multiple timelines at the same time.
The telephone is today, just a tertiary function on the phone. The phone is something else entirely new, a fascinating evolution of a technology that used to require wires, for us to actually be somewhere. Now, we can be anywhere. Time and space has shifted.
Our phones are highly personal, each one varied in how we arrange the apps, what apps we use, the cases we put on them to express ourselves just as we do with clothing. Phones have transformed us as individuals and societies. In Japan, people hold funerals for the dead phones. The phone of today is as essential a survival tool of the digital age as the stone axe was in the stone age.
How we envision a phone in our mind is no longer a telephone. R.I.P. to the telephone. Long live the phone.
