THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504210492
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines
For decades it hung on the kitchen wall or sat on the desk minding its own business. You could have any color you wanted so long as it was black. And you used the gizmo to talk to the next door neighbor.
It was the phone.
These days the color is more likely to be plain vanilla. You don't say Hello Central or dial them, you push buttons. They don't sit around the house but ride around in pocket or car and are likely to have minds of their own.
The phone today lets you talk around the globe, but that's just the beginning. Using a computer, you can telecommute. Using a fax, you can send documents down the line. You can record messages when you aren't home, screen calls when you are, forward them, have your phone redial or speed dial if you can figure out how to do it. Technology sophisticates are aware that there are answering machines that can talk to answering machines on the other end, thus allowing for conversations without human participation.
Some of this is a terrific boon and some is a terrific bore. Being able to dodge incoming phone pests is great. But when you are the pest, unable to get a human at the other end of your calls, it's infuriating. If you aren't put on hold by a robot and forced to endure elevator music, you are talked through a maze of push button instructions by a recording.
``To order service, push 1. For questions about billing, push 2. To purchase stock in the company, press 3. If your vacuum cleaner is acting like it's possessed and won't stop chasing you around the living room, push all you like, it won't do any good. All our service representatives are busy.
Some people have become phone junkies. They can't take a simple drive without dialing up somebody and swerving all over the road with one hand on the wheel and one to their ear. They talk on the phone while in the bath, walking down city streets, or aloft at 30,000 feet. You can hear them being paged or beeped or buzzed in movie theaters or in the middle of oral surgery. They spend their days faxing and their nights prowling the mean streets of the information superhighway where it's flame or be flamed.
Others of us find our eyes crossing at the blizzard of services now available over phone lines. It's all too much. All we ever wanted to do was call up Aunt Martha for her pie crust recipe. Now we have to choose between AT&T, Sprint or MCI to do it and risk being put on hold or interfacing with an answering device. If Martha is on the Internet we may have to use a computer to reach her, type our request and express our moods in code.
Paradoxically, the phone has increased the distance between people in some ways. It has been the death of letter-writing which may have permitted a greater intimacy than chatting directly. One can read the collected letters of Jefferson or Lincoln with great interest. Will the collected phone calls of Carter or Clinton ever be available? And if they are, will anyone care?
Once there were party lines, so if your life was dull you could eavesdrop on your neighbors. Now, some families have separate lines for the adults and the children. Eventually, each family member may be tethered at the end of his own electronic umbilical cord, but cut off from all direct human contact.
Actually, some of us have never much cared for talking on the phone because it is a dilute experience. A lot of the facial signs and body language we rely on to understand what's really being said is absent. They keep promising the videophone will take care of that, but the promises have been made for 30 years.
But whether you like the wired world of phones or not, get used to it. There's no going back to the friendly operator or real live answering service. Ernestine may have had a chip on her shoulder but she was more fun than the chip that's replaced her.
Today, it's shopping by phone, commuting by phone, 800 numbers and 900 numbers, phone sex and the chance to get all tangled up in the web of the Internet. You can buy trash via QVC, then call up a phone psychic to find out why. Every evening during dinner you can count on a call from a man trying to get you to contribute to a worthy cause, a woman asking you to take part in a survey or a conman anxious to sell you shares in the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine.
Tomorrow, we can look forward to cable TV coming over the phone line and the merger of phone, computer and Dick Tracy's wrist radio into some new all-purpose, all-encompassing, hybrid connection to the world's nervous system.
Just over a decade ago, AT&T was the biggest American corporation. So big that the government decided to break it up. But that only made phonedom metastasize. Now AT&T is the fourth biggest U.S. corporation in sales and the so-called Baby Bells have assets triple that of AT&T. And that doesn't begin to include Sprint and GTE and Alltel and Multitel and Cosmo-tel and Infi-tel. It turns out you can get away from Ma Bell but you can never escape all her progeny - the Bellettes.
The telephone has been an inescapable part of American culture for 100 years. They made a movie about Alexander Graham Bell and a musical comedy about an answering service. The pillow talk between Rock and Doris was on a party line. E.T. phoned home. And where would Superman have been without the phone booth?
Bob Newhart and Shelley Berman did jokes on the phone. Artists have made giant phones and surreal phones. TV had the Bell Telephone Hour and Maxwell Smart talked into his shoe. There are phone songs by everyone - Glenn Miller, Chuck Berry, Blondie, Todd Rundgren, Astrud Gilberto, ELO, and Jim Croce.
We can now call in to talk to Larry King or Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon or Ollie, Howard Stern or Bob Berkowitz. The National Security Agency is an entire covert agency devoted largely to tapping phones. Watergate was a phone scandal. And Chuck Robb's friends listened into Doug Wilder's conversations. Even the royal couple, Charles and Diana, have been bugged.
Speaking of being bugged by the phone, perhaps the greatest pop culture statement regarding telephony came in the James Coburn film, ``The President's Analyst.'' In it, the leader of the free world spills national security secrets while on the couch. Coburn, as his shrink, finds himself being pursued by Russians, Chinese communists, the CIA.
Inquiring minds want to know, but someone keeps bumping off all the other spooks. It turns out to be the most powerful information agency on earth - the phone company. Belatedly, Coburn realized that all his patients have one thing in common. They all hate and fear the phone company.
Now, all that's changed. We love it. We don't even seem to notice that Coburn's paranoid fantasy has come true. Not only was the phone company out to get us, it has succeeded. We've been gotten. We are on line. We plug in every morning and don't sign off until we go to sleep. We have taken the Road to Bellville and can't hang up. ILLUSTRATION: JOHN CORBITT/Staff
by CNB