You have to be of a certain age to feel a tug at your heart each time smartphones are made smarter. This month, when Apple unveiled its iPhone X with facial recognition software obviating the need for a passcode for a user to open her phone, it was not just questions of security and surveillance that presented themselves. This way of intimately locking a phone to its (presumable) owner threatened to take us yet another step away from an older civility of sharing the use of a communication device.
An object now obsolete
Mobile phones have, no doubt, made getting around our world much easier. As Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron wrote in their detailed account, Cellphone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Lives in India : “The cheap mobile phone is the most disruptive device to hit humanity since shoes.” There is no need to list these revolutionary changes, as we could probably chant them in unison together, with no prior coordination. It is, however, bracing to be reminded of an object that’s been made almost obsolete with this revolution: the phone booth.
In a slim, pocket-sized book in the Object Lessons series, called Phone Booth, Ariana Kelly interweaves the history of this once “ordinary” thing with philosophical questions of privacy and sanctuary as well as copious references to popular culture to convey a sense of what is being lost. As an aside, in India we experienced the truly liberating consequences of the public phone via the public call offices (or PCOs) with which the telecom revolution swept our landscape, so that when someone says pay phone, it’s that particular shade of yellow that lights up in our minds and not the sound of the coin-drop facility as in older times. But no matter where you are and what the shape of the telephone box or kiosk you were exposed to, all the talk continues to be centred on how to repurpose not just the actual booth, but also the idea. She lists them. As public Wi-Fi hotspots. As local libraries, as in London. As ATMs. Even as a work of art, as the public graffiti artist Banksy so strikingly managed when a broken red telephone box lying flat with a hammer on its side, and a pool of “blood” on the ground, appeared on a London sidewalk.
Kelly, who teaches literature and comparative religion in the U.S., however, opens the book with a description of an abandoned phone booth put to a more therapeutic use, and one based on the notes, advertisements, and pointless messages that one found at these spots. “Standing in a garden in Otsuchi, a small town in the Iwate prefecture, on the east coast of Japan, there is a nonworking telephone booth that has nevertheless been used by more than ten thousand people since the spring of 2011,” she writes. The reference is to the massive earthquake and tsunami that killed 15,000 people and devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands more. A local resident set up the booth as a place to leave a message for lost ones, calling it “Phone Booth of the Winds”. There was an unconnected rotary dial telephone instrument, but the mode of communication was paper and pencil, inviting visitors to leave messages “and trust that the wind will carry the contents to their intended recipients.” It was a measure of the installation’s powerful effect that when it was damaged by inclement weather some years later, she says contributions poured in for its repair.
Leaning in
The phone booth, in its era, was many things, and Kelly counts them evocatively. It was a sanctuary. It was a place of privacy — and her account of Howard Hughes, the wealthy aviator-entrepreneur made yet more eccentric by an obsessive-compulsive disorder, touches our anxiety about the ease of surveillance in the cell phone age. As his disorder became more acute, Hughes became fearful that he could be tracked, and he had his staff install a series of phone booths in his living quarters. Yet, it was also a shared space: you did not have a care about the antecedents of who used the phone before or after you.
In fact, the phone booth assumed a certain awareness about those waiting to use the phone, so that conversations were clipped to allow the next person her call. It assumed a certain posture: “Virtually no one stands up straight; nearly everyone leans, usually against the triangular shelf beneath the telephone, or against the wall of the booth itself. They follow the line of the telephone, which follows the line of the face. It is an angle of nonchalance, absorption, self-importance, seduction; they are on the verge of sliding.”
Compare this with the clumsy posture of the mobile age, while walking for instance. Do a time-lapse photograph of a busy sidewalk, with an older-era demographic of nobody talking on the phone, and there will be a certain grace to the trajectory. With folks talking as they walk, however, that flow of the sidewalk changes, as Alexandra Horowitz describes so well in On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes : “[Pedestrians] no longer follow the rules that make walking on a crowded sidewalk go smoothly: they do not align themselves (they swerve); they do not avoid (they bump); and they do not slip behind and between others (they blunder).”
And this was written in the time before augmented reality!
