Never much of a one for telephone calls, least of all long telephone calls, I was an enthusiastic adopter of emails and text messages when they first appeared. Less obtrusive than calls, they were more efficient for my way of working. They freed up a lot of time as far as I was concerned.
While I love chatting in person, I find it difficult to sustain long telephone calls. So the direct approach of a text message is right up my street. I can deal with it instantly or snooze it to my convenience.
Early adopter
For my communication needs, I was an early adopter of PDAs or personal digital assistants. While many of these bulky devices had the ability to make phone calls, I bought them entirely for their organisational capabilities. I put up with the phone bit even though 99.9 per cent of my use was for data.
Even when I moved over to Apple’s iPhone in 2008, I looked on this new device as a small personal computer. The “phone” bit was pretty redundant, in my view. I saw Apple’s new baby as more iCom than iPhone, and, in retrospect, they probably made a mistake in calling it a phone. We are now saddled with it, a name that describes only a sliver of the iPhone’s overall capabilities and real-world use.
Relegated
I realised that, while I received a few phone calls, I seldom made any. I soon relegated Apple’s Phone app to a “media” folder on the screen, where it has remained to this day. I continue to regard the iPhone as a computer and communicator for the written word rather than a talking device.
![Once the darling of the tech crowd, the slim and efficient Palm Pilot. This model didn't make calls, it just did its digital organisinf bit. Image: Channel R at English Wikipedia, [GNU Free Documentation Licence]](https://www.macfilos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Palmpilot5000_eu.png)
Once the darling of the tech crowd, the slim and efficient Palm Pilot. This model didn’t make calls, it just did its digital organising bit. Image: Channel R at English Wikipedia, [GNU Free Documentation Licence] 
The Compaq IPAQ Pocket PC was one of the most popular pre-iPhone PDAs (Image: Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons)
Many will disagree, I am sure, and will think me odd. Indeed, even I used to think I was a bit weird. I would see people walking down the street chatting away on their phones or talking to the world at large through their microphone-equipped earbuds. I’ve sat on buses or trains for hours and listened to people conducting one call the whole time. Where was I going wrong? Perhaps I was the odd one out?
I could never envisage doing this. What, I wonder, do people have to talk about for so long. It’s especially baffling if you’ve ever earwigged such a conversation (generally, you can’t help it) because banality tends to rule: “Yeah, and she went like did you? And I goes yes I did.” And that’s just Harry and Meg.
A common spirit at last
Now, praise be to Mercury and Hermes, I realise I’m not alone in the world. There are more strange people out there. This article on ZDNet by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes seems to be tuned spot on to my wavelength: “If you’re anything like me”, he says, “you rarely, if ever, make a call. Instead, you send an email or a quick message. Calls are a wasteland… Pretty much every time I hit that green button on a call from someone who isn’t in my contacts, I end up regretting it.”
Adrian just about sums up my feelings: “The phone is a device from a different era. While the device itself has changed, it retains the worst of its original qualities — a device that emits an annoying noise and demands immediate attention.”
Now, what do you think? Are you a caller or a texter? Do you prefer to have stuff in writing so you can deal with it at your convenience, or do you gladly suffer the insistent wail of the crying baby that is the phone, demanding instant attention? I will be interested to see what you think…
Join our community and play an active part in the future of Macfilos: This site is run by a group of volunteers and dedicated authors around the world. It is supported by donations from readers who appreciate a calm, stress-free experience, with courteous comments and an absence of advertising or commercialisation. Why not subscribe to the thrice-weekly newsletter by joining our mailing list? Comment on this article or, even, write your own. And if you have enjoyed the ride so far, please consider making a small donation to our ever-increasing running costs.
Wired telephone for calling. Wired computer for emailing.
“Planetary electromagnetic pollution: it is time to assess its impact,” The Lancet Planetary Health 2, no. 12 (December 2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(18)30221-3
Are you aware of all the electromagnetic radiation from, say, always-on transformers for electric doorbells; transformers – and electromagnetic radiation from other components – in, say, domestic TV sets; kitchen appliances; electric toothbrush chargers; low-voltage and fluorescent indoor lighting; computers’ mains-powered chargers and power supply units; kitchen refrigerators; mains-powered, or gas-powered, domestic boilers?
What about the hefty electro-magnetic fields around electric ‘Tube Train’ motors – enough, I seem to remember, to wipe the tapes of a concert which some hapless BBC engineer was carrying on a tube train once upon a time?
Er “..Wired telephone for calling. Wired computer for emailing..” isn’t going to make much difference – I don’t think – within the constant electrosmog of police, fire-engine and surveillance two-way radios, radio networked mains electricity ‘smart’ meters, always-on VHF & UHF radio and television transmitters and repeaters, and all the rest of the wireless radiation from almost every electrical device around us.
Anyway, I’m off to Savile Row for another fitting of my lead-lined suit ..but hoping that I don’t get lead poisoning!
Sensible words, David. And, if you are tempted to a lead-lined suit, I would have been disappointed had you NOT ordered it from Saville Row.
True, there is far too much electricity of all kinds in use. But you can read the distinctions they make in the short paper linked above. Or you can explore any of the around 3,000 studies done now. Industrialism and technologism have not been kind to life on earth.
We really need to start considering how we live and how much is in the long term sustainable. Here are a couple recent quotes from people who have been considering such things.
—–
Philippe Bihouix, engineer, France, October 2020:
“In many areas we can drastically reduce our resource and energy needs, for example, in transportation, smaller, lighter and slower cars would have significantly reduced impact, public transport and bicycles even more so. We could reduce the environmental impact of digital systems by over 90% by avoiding duplicated networks and redundant systems; by favouring wired access, which consumes much less energy; by properly designing data centre software and architecture; by giving up the race for speed, real time and immediacy, which consumes a lot of equipment and generates additional traffic; reducing unnecessary functionality and performance; by working on the service life of the equipment, through modularity, ‘repairability’, compatibility and interoperability.”
“But it will take a profound rethinking of existing practices, economic models, regulatory approaches, cultural patterns and educational methods to reflect on our real needs and successfully implement intelligent sobriety. We are very far from it.”
—–
Vaclav Smil, environmental scientist and geographer, Canada, July 2014:
“I am probably one of the last people on the planet without a cell phone. I have the same old, black, basic phone hanging on my kitchen wall that I’ve had for 25 years. The mass is far larger than today’s cell phones, but in the end I’ve used far less material by keeping it.
“Now people buy cell phones which are an accumulation of silver, copper and other metals that it takes a lot of energy to extract and mold — every six months! And most of these cell phones are not recycled. They are just thrown away. That is absolute waste.
“People say, ‘oh, this cell phone is so much lighter and better for the environment and blah, blah, blah.’ But no, there has been no absolute dematerialization. We are just using more of everything. The same is true, obviously, of iPads and tablets.”
I am grateful for your contribution so far, but I suggest we leave it at this. Thank you.
Have black rotary bedroom, touchtone kitchen wall, daughters old bedroom princess touchtone, me apple I think a 6 or 7 wife flip phone one iPaD one tablet and brand new still in boxes w cellofsne wrap wife retirement gift HEW PACKARD SYSTEM COMPLETE W COLOR PRINTER. She just looked at pics on boxes said that’s nice! So much for me w this tech junk! Text or Email or phone all the same to me
I’m just going to call you Mike…
That’s a great idea Brian! I can easily imagine an app called “Flush” with a neon pink toilet icon.
Further to your astute point earlier, I had gone on a photography outing to an island off of the island I live on. I was dining in a pub, before I caught a ferry back to home island. There was a young couple at an adjacent table that was clearly on a first date. He was constantly looking at his “smart phone” and she looked irritated. He went to the washroom. I mentioned to her that a ferry was about ti depart. She thanked me and caught the ferry. He came out of the washroom and studied his phone. Eventually he looked around puzzled. He eventually asked the server and she said she had left. It made my day!
Regular readers of this column will know that Mike embraces 21st Century technology whether it’s, cars, communication devices or money. However it’s 2021 and we still have coins and there are two sides to every coin. Personally talking on a phone is the only thing I use the device for and I find verbal communication much superior to texting. I rarely have the “She said..he said.”.. kind of conversations, but last month my girlfriend called me for no apparent reason. When I asked her why she called she replied..” I just want to hear the sound of your voice.”
No text or emoji message can beat that! If this “Era” means only using text messages and the same generic emoji that everyone else can send I’s another step toward dehumanization. I”m keeping the phone and the girlfriend.
I totally agree. I phone a person as it is so much more personal and you also hear emotions in a voice that are not in a text. I use texting for very simple confirmations.
I also dumped facebook after a short period of seeing endless inane posts. I also had countless people from my school days wanting to be friends – we never talked back then so why would I care what they are having for breakfast.
I would like a flushing app for deleting. It would be satisfying seeing annoying things swirling down the toilet. I would really love this feature in a contact app. There could be opposite swirl version for south of the equator.
Now one week in to a massive clean out of my home office/study I have assembled a small pile of electronic calculators. Large and small, scientific and not, never to be used again – the iPhone app has taken over.
🎼”Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end…” 🎼 Mary Hopkin, a long time ago.
My iPhone tries to make calls through the wifi which often doesn’t work. Or if I am leaving the house the call cuts out. Or if the cell phone signal is too weak at the back of our house. So I like to use the house land line phone for important voice calls. My most recent call to Mike being a case in point.
So I’m sceptical about using my iPhone for calls and I’m not giving up on the (more or less) wired tech yet.
I use about 1% of my iphone’s brain. I use it mostly to check email and to read blogs and search internet. I do minimal texting as most texting is a waste of my time telling me that there is nothing worthwhile going on in that person’s life for the moment anything. I turn my phone off so that I can remove the electronic ball and chain and be in the moment. If I go out for lunch with someone and they keep checking their phone I do not waste my precious time again with them. I think there needs to be an intervention with a lot of people on phone usage. I wonder how many relationships have been ruined by them.
I didn’t think much of the Palm Pilot or the iPaq ‘Pocket PC’, but I was sent the first version of the Psion Organiser – by Psion – to use and to own. I didn’t think much of that, as it was just a small, bulky, electronic address book, and looking things up electronically was no faster than running your thumb down the A-Z edge of an ordinary pocket book.
The 2nd Organiser, though, was much more accomplished, so I bought one of those: it had apps, a programming language, and an (optional) RS232 cable for controlling external things (..we used them at the Natural History Museum for controlling interactive exhibits in the Human Biology section, for example).
I was an ‘early adopter’ of mobile phones (..I swapped my whatever-the-security-company-was-called in-car phone for London’s very first (analogue) cell-phone ..can’t remember what it was called, but it preceded BT’s ‘Brick’ by several months). Ah; the ‘Technophone’.
Then I got a Nokia ‘Communicator’ (2nd version, I think ..the only phone which could also send faxes as well as receive them). When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, I said I couldn’t possibly give up faxing for a built-in music player ..but little did I realise that faxes were to die a death within months!
So I DID get an (..the 1st..) iPhone ..and didn’t bother with faxes ever again, as (almost) the whole world quickly moved over to email. But I got my iPhone primarily for phone calls ..so that I was ‘available’ ..but only to the people to whom I gave my number. And I did use it for making calls, too: checking that a shop was open before I took the bus or taxi to their door in central London, for instance. I was still working for a publishing company, and so staff could reach me if and when they needed to – wherever I was! (And talking of Mercury and Hermes (..aren’t they the same entity?..) I had a Mercury phone before the iPhone ..remember Mercury? ..a division of Cable & Wireless, I think. They, too, ran a mobile network, along with BT, Racal, Vodaphone, and others.)
I use my present iPhone (..oh, the Nokia Communicator came with a separate infra-red-connected camera, which took decent pictures, could send the pics to the phone via IR, and the Nokia could then send the photos on to other people..) as a phone, as also a stills camera (with an extra couple of add-on ‘Moment’-brand wide-angle lenses), as a video camera (ditto), as a pocket recorder (successor to a pocket tape machine) ..and with a separate add-on ‘mid/side’ stereo mic ..we-ell, a couple: one from Shure and one from Zoom (the pocket recorder people, not the video-chat people), and I use all manner of apps; GPS, ship-identification, flag identification, book reading apps, instant banking (and paying-in those old-fashioned paper cheques by just taking a photo of them!), ‘Shazam’ for identifying music and (sometimes) buying it, booking Eurostar tickets (when things are back to normal again), for watching British TV abroad (via ‘Slingbox’) or German TV here or elsewhere, for renting a car (when back to normal), as a pocket light-meter, for sending flowers, for booking an Uber (out of central London where no black cabs are available), for buying on eBay, for checking flight times (WTABTN) and many dozens more conveniences. Oh, and for flying a drone now and again.
I use it for all the different things which it’s capable of ..and with many of those it sends notifications to my watch, too. (Though I don’t use those ‘health’ apps ..you can probably tell..)
(Nik Powell, when he was a film producer, and not just running the Scala Cinema, conducted much of his production business on his pocket phone when he was on the bus into work! ..And Lew Grade, apocryphally, had TWO phones in his car and would say “can you just hang on a minute, I’m on my other car phone”!)
I just lurve iPhones; they’re ‘productivity tools’ par excellence ..whether it’s web-browsing, booking a meal, calling someone – or receiving a call – and generally getting by in today’s world. (And, of course, the film “Tangerine”, and about a dozen others, was shot on (..well, on several..) iPhones.)
It’s everything Steve Jobs promised it would be ..and more!
Yes, indeed, David, Mercury and Hermes are the same gents. I was just catering for my Roman and Greek readers.
You will be impressed that I had a radio phone in my car in the 1970s. There was a huge box of tricks in the boot, a small box under the flash and a black telephone handset screwed to the centre console (or what passed for a console in those days). The whole ensemble was topped off with an enormous whiplash aerial on a little curled-spring base. Very impressive.
The system was entirely manual in that you had to press a button, wait for the operator to answer and then ask for the number. Worse, it was simplex speech, with a “speak” button on the handset, although I believe they introduced full duplex later. But at the time it was very much Roger over and out stuff. Funnily enough, the coverage area was large and, often, the signal better than modern cellphones in more remote areas. I suppose it worked on VHF or something, or perhaps even short wave. I am sure you had one too.
“..I am sure you had one too..” ..yes, mine was operated by the security people ..what were they called? Ah, ‘Securicor’, of course!
I too had “..an enormous whiplash aerial on a little curled-spring base..” but I chose a magnetic base, so that I could carry it from car to car. Although I had a (smallish) box under the front seat – but no “huge box of tricks in the boot” – that box was easily lifted out and carried from one car to another.
At first I had a teeny Honda Something which had half a motor-bike engine under the bonnet (“hood”) ..it must have been a Honda 600 (I bought it from Mac Campbell of ‘Angling Times’ for £50) ..so the aerial was larger than the car!
But when a goat ate the car in London’s Docklands, I bought a huge white Jaguar ..mainly because it had the same – we-ell, similar – registration to my father’s little Renault ..I think it ended in ‘500D’. The aerial was much better proportioned on that.
My ‘number’ was (hmm; it was originally ‘Vigilant’-something..) but I think it was Black Three-Zero-Five ..or maybe that was on another car-phone system. The beauty of it was that there was no call charge ..they couldn’t be bothered itemising every single call ..so you paid a small (monthly?) subscription, and all the calls were free, AND the operators would provide a kind of secretarial service, so that if the call you wanted couldn’t be put through, they’d try again later, and either pass messages on your behalf, or would then call you back in the car to say they’d managed to connect you (..rather like the ship-to-shore service operated by BT).
So you could buzz them and say “Please pass this message to Mike Evans on 012 345 6789: ‘sorry can’t be with you at 10; see you at 4:30 instead'”.
“..Funnily enough, the coverage area was large..” ..yes; mine (Securicor’s) covered the whole country with only 4 masts ..one near Liverpool (which covered all of Wales), one at Wrotham (pronounced Rootam) in Kent, another somewhere towards the East, and maybe one in Scotland. But as so few people used the service (..just their own Securicor vans, and a few extra subscribers like me..) the frequency was almost always pretty much unused ..so calls were easy to put through. [I feel like David Hemmings in “Blow Up”, coming out of the (Salvation Army?) hostel at the start of the film with a paper package under his arm, walking round the corner to his convertible Rolls, and putting through his calls via ‘Air Call’ ..remember them?]
Maybe it was VHF, although the aerial seemed too large for that and VHF coverage is only ‘line-of-sight’, so perhaps it was plain medium wave ..and when I’d paid my ‘hire purchase’ subscription for 3 years the phone was all mine, and the calls remained free ..but that coincided with the start of cellular, so I switched to that, because the phone slipped into your – well, my – pocket, and didn’t need a huge external aerial ..but that service initially covered only the ‘M4 Corridor’ (central London to Heathrow Airport ..originally for listening-in on the Zimbabwe independence negotiators after their Lancaster House talks..) and a few extra cities like Manchester, etc.
(My first call on that original cellular service was to 222 1234 (London Transport) to ask if the all-night number 15 bus to Poplar was running late.)
I tend to use WhatsApp for all messages, sending images etc. etc.
Purely because it doesn’t send me dodgy texts from banks I’ve never used. It doesn’t cold call me. I only answer to contacts or of I know the number.
For work google meet is king of the ring, with text messaging on the work IPhone.
As for calling, mainly business calls, or if I need to ring a company with regards something important – like an order, or something of that ilk.
I have rarely touched either the 5000 mins or 5000 texts per month. But I like the comfort of knowing they are there is needed.
Mainly non talking stuff for me when my phone is working. My brand new iPhone 12 decided to stop working with a locked screen this afternoon, but after pushing buttons for a while it did me the favour of unlocking itself again. So a machine I use but it is not always trustworthy. Cold calling from remote Pacific islands still goes on but they are easy to spot. When others from closer to home get through I tell the caller that I won’t waste their time if they don’t waste mine and then I switch off the phone. The worst of all are, you guessed it, telecoms companies saying that I am due for an ‘upgrade’. I always tell them that I will call them when I want a new phone. That could be a never ending game of what we used to call ‘telephone tag’.
Does anyone here remember the days when a businessman (nearly always a man) who wanted to show that he was a real ‘action man’ would have his photo taken while on the phone. No self respecting businessperson today would have their photo taken today while on a smartphone. Times have changed.
William
I remember a story from many years ago when Hambro Life Insurance Company was heavily into cold calling to drum up business… an orchestral conductor at rehearsal was in front of his orchestra and an assistant ran in to tell him there was an urgent phone call which was a life and death issue. He ran from the podium to the phone in an office to be told…”Hello I’m from Hambro life and I would like to know whether you have life insurance”.
Nowadays we are plagued with automated cold calls from criminals pretending to be from a well respected firm or bank. However one needs to answer all phone calls, day or night. My son phoned at 6am one morning last December to say he was feeling very ill. He had Covid 19.
With the adoption of widespread ‘working from home’ policies over the last year, those of us in ‘hi-tech’ companies have found the ability to participate in Google Meet or Zoom calls from our hand-held devices extremely useful – even more so than exchanging text messages or teleconferencing via the telephone function. Slide presentations are easy to follow, and the audio quality is excellent through in-ear buds. I even listened in on a meeting whilst at the hairdresser, having a trim, or on a stroll, enjoying some fresh air. Slack also works really well as a direct messaging platform, with the option of posting photos taken on the device’s camera, or gifs downloaded from the web. It’s a new world…
I’m with you on this one Mike. I rarely use my iPhone for anything other than texts or email, plus of course some of the oh so useful apps.
Good to hear. You could have phoned me, of course, but it’s nice to have a comment!
Nothing like some crisp British humour to start off the day 😀