Listening to a colleague describe demographic research she’s doing, I realized that I belonged finally with the dinosaur generation. And here’s why.
I believe I saw my last pay phone yesterday. It sat there, silent and lonely, forgotten in a hotel cubby, its coin receptacle gaping in futility for the sound of metal upon metal. Hour after hour, the box that used to jangle and ring constantly, served no purpose except to remind us of a time when we had to speak to our friends, family and colleagues in fixed locations.
When I first started in business, I would drive about 37,000 miles a year. During the trips between clients and the office, I had to stop into places around the county where I could make phone calls. I memorized approximately 150 locations where pay phones were available and little used. It did no good to drop into hotels, convenience stores or restaurants, because those phones were invariably in use. I had to seek out phones that were on street corners, gas stations, tucked behind apartment buildings…pay phones that didn’t get the visibility or traffic others experienced, so that I could count on them being available.
Then, in the early nineties, the car phone emerged. This massive, multi-part equipment was installed permanently in the car. There was a large unit that was bolted in the trunk, cables and wires snaked into the passenger compartment, a pedestal upon which the handset perched, a tall antenna to receive the analog signals and extra features such as a microphone and speaker box that mounted on the dashboard so you could talk without taking your hands off the wheel. The installation took about four hours, and was done by a car audio service facility. All together, the phone and the installation cost about $800 to $1,000. When you sold your car, the phone went with it.
Those early car phones were amazing. All of a sudden, my car was my office. I didn’t have to make interminable stops during the day. I had the ability to connect to people while I was en route from appointment to appointment. My office became less central to my work. There was less use for a physical business location other than my own head. Except for storing the mounting pile of paper that was created during the course of my work (no e-mail yet). Half of my office space was devoted to filing cabinets.
The analog phones had a few glitches, however. Instead of memorizing pay phone locations, now I had to memorize geographical regions where the signal dropped off. I got so good at it that I could time my phone calls to start and end just as the signal disappeared behind a mountain. Occasionally, I’d end up on a party line, listening in to someone else’s call, because the transmissions were not separated through complex coding and could be carried over common frequencies. There was a time when phone “hijackers” would drive around the freeways, co-opting phone transmission frequencies to make their own calls on somebody else’s dime. And it cost a lot per minute to make those calls.
Then the car phone battery improved, and the electronics continued to shrink, to a point where the instrument could be disconnected from the vehicle. Now that was a wonderful thing. You could keep the phone even when the car was traded. Except the battery lasted about two hours, maximum. And the signal coverage wasn’t that great yet. And the analog signals could still be hijacked or snooped. But hey, it could fit in your briefcase! It looked like a walkie-talkie out of World War II. Very cool.
The shrinking continued. The batteries got better. The signals got stronger and broader. Analog went to digital, and carrier waves became more secure. Ear buds sprouted, first connected by wires to the phone, and then freed from even that gossamer tether.
One day, not too long ago, I was walking down the street towards my morning coffee at Caffe Italia, actively engaged in a conversation, my Bluetooth earbud barely visible in my right ear. My arms were waving, my speech animate. Across the street walked a man in the opposite direction who was also engaged in a conversation, similarly energetic, gesticulating in the air. I couldn’t see his earbud. Because he didn’t have one. In that moment, the only thing separating my behavior from this homeless schizophrenic was a tiny plastic piece of electronics that, if seen from the perspective of an earlier time, was a minor difference between us.
Yesterday, a middle-aged senior executive described the skill his teenagers and their friends have developed, i.e. “touch texting”, the ability to send text messages to someone without looking at the phone’s keypad, while engaged in other activities such as watching TV, playing video games or eating dinner with the family. Viewed from a distance, at a vantage point where the phone disappears in the teen’s hands, the behavior looks strikingly like autism or obsessive compulsive disorder.
Isaac Asimov once said that sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic to those unfamiliar with how it was created. A corollary to that notion is that sufficiently advanced technology and psychosis are also indistinguishable.