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Nicholas Carr's avatar

Insightful post. It's fascinating how much about social practices can be revealed by a study of mundane media artifacts, particularly those that have become obsolete.

I'm reminded of Harvey Sacks's discussion in Lectures on Conversation of how the arrival of the telephone circa 1900 created three new social roles in households: the caller, the called, and the answerer. The person in the role of the answerer was in the tricky position of not knowing whether or not they'd also take on the role of the called. This created, as Sacks wrote, a complicated and sometimes fraught familial dynamic around every incoming call:

"It’s from among the possible calleds that answerers are selected; answerer being now a merely potential resting state, where you’ve made preparations for turning out to be the called right off when you say 'Hello.' Answerers can become calleds, or they can become non-calleds-but-talked-to, or they can remain answerers, in the sense of not being talked to themselves, and also having what turn out to be obligations incumbent on being an answerer-not-called; obligations like getting the called or taking a message for the called.

"Having done the picking up of the phone, they have been turned into someone at the mercy of the treatment that the caller will give them: What kind of jobs are they going to impose? Are they even going to talk to them? A lot of family world is implicated in the way those little things come out, an enormous amount of conflict turning on being always the answerer and never the called, and battles over who is to pick up the phone."

When the mobile phone replaced the communal phone, it also, of course, meant the end of the role of the answerer.

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Janet Salmons PhD's avatar

Thanks for your thought-provoking post. Those of us who were early Internet enthusiasts can't help but despair at the level of information control. Read what we let you read and rewrite with AI to say what we want you to say.

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