"When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental. But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth."
"I remember vividly the first time a girl called 14-year-old me at my family home on the landline. My mother answered the phone which sat on a bench in a book-lined downstairs room we reverentially called the den which included a special shelf for the White and Yellow Pages (remember them?). Mum gave this caller the third degree who was she and what did she want? before eventually summonsing me to the phone to name the very forward girl asking to speak to me."
Landline telephones shaped household social dynamics and created shared, often intrusive, family experiences around a single answering point. Teenage social negotiations frequently unfolded in full view of parents and siblings because calls arrived in communal rooms like the den. Early memories include a girl's call to a 14-year-old, a mother interrogating the caller, and the boy being summoned to the phone. The landline made callers and their relationships known to everyone in the house. Smartphones have fundamentally changed how calls are made and received. Answering felt formal, with recalled home numbers like '8361' embedded in memory. Calling friends often required speaking first to siblings.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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