Outside The Box

The welcome silence of this sylvan spring morning is misleading. Underneath the quiet is a rich tapestry of sound: bird talk, a gentle breeze moving the treetops, the distant alert of a crow, and the nearby objections of a chicken. Tree frogs are encouraging the clouds to produce more rain, and a squirrel is using language unfit for polite company.

“Quiet” in this hidden cove is the absence of sounds we don’t like: traffic, gunshots in the middle of the night, and just about anything in the Top 40.

There is one aspect of legacy technology I sometimes miss, and that is the sound of a telephone ringing. Smartphones don’t really ring. They ping and chirp and make angelic tinkling sounds or funny noises. You can configure them to ring like one of the old phones that used to hang on the wall attached to a wire, but a tiny speaker doesn’t resonate like metal on metal, and there is no replacement for the tactile sensation of a rotary dial, or even the feedback of a touch-tone handset.

Only 30% of Americans have landlines now, and I unplugged mine some time ago when it became more of a growing expense than a necessity. It wasn’t so long ago that we still glance from time to time at the place on the counter where the answering machine used to be.

We lost something in the landline’s exit from society, an unexpected consequence like those that accompany many of the wonders of technology meant to improve our lives but which also serve to weaken the fabric that protects us from the elements.

For nearly a century, when the telephone on the wall rang, we didn’t know who was on the other end of the line, and we spoke to whoever the caller might be—the in-laws, the kids’ classmates. Even if the call wasn’t meant for us, we shared a moment exchanging greetings, strengthening the fabric just a little, multiplied by millions of calls every day across the nation.

Answering machines became widespread in the 70s and ruled the roost for about 30 years before smartphones began to dominate communications. Answering machines were a boon to business, but they, along with caller ID, also allowed us to become more insular. We could screen calls and delay communication. If we felt obligated to call someone but didn’t really want to talk to them, we could wait until they weren’t home and leave a message.

Few Americans now are ever separated from their phones during waking hours. Half of us have never gone longer than 24 hours without our little glow boxes. Eighty percent check them within 10 minutes of waking up. Half of us keep them within reach while we sleep.

Yet we are more insulated and more divided than in living memory. With the ability to talk more using something that is never out of reach, we talk less, and as far as our opinions and our politics, we’re like the Appalachian pioneers or islanders in the South Pacific separated by the physical barriers of geography.

Instead of talking, we text, tweet, and post. We listen to professional talkers. Pixels don’t convey the nuances of the human voice, not to mention the body language of a face-to-face conversation. The written word can be packed with meaning, but those words are getting shorter along with our attention spans. What’s worse, education is failing to give us the tools to properly interpret the shrinking list of words we do recognize.

A friend who lives in the urban cliff dwellings recently commented on a walk through a university campus where he observed groups of young people moving from place to place with that characteristic slump, phones in hand, heads down and focused on the screens. There was no conversation within the pods of people. Yesterday we saw a family of five staring at five phones at a table in a restaurant, and they spoke not a word to each other.

The cell phone slump is not just endemic among our youth, but the young will pay the steepest toll. The charges keep appending for long-term spinal issues and sleep disruption induced during the formative years, and we don’t know if we can afford to pay when the bill comes due for entire generations.

A nation’s strength lies in the fabric of its connections—the voices shared across dinner tables, the laughter exchanged in passing, the unexpected calls that brought loved ones together. In our rush to embrace convenience, we’ve weakened that cloth. When the storm comes—and it always does—we may find that the fabric we thought would protect us has left us more exposed than we ever imagined. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll miss the ring of the telephone, not just for the sound it made, but for the bonds it once reinforced.