Telephone

The telephone is one of the three most influential modern inventions (see also Automobile; Watch). It has played an extraordinarily pervasive role and had amazingly diverse effects in altering communication patterns between people and in modernizing society. Telephones are the nerve ends of the modern world: like the body’s central nervous system, they connect disparate members and channel messages from one to the other. Though occasionally we wish we could be as far away from it as possible and curse its intrusion on our lives, most of us use the telephone constantly and greatly appreciate all that it does for us. In the 120 years since its invention by Alexander Graham Bell, it has spread from the world of male-dominated business and government circles and the homes of the urban rich to the simplest dwellings in the most remote areas.

Ironically, when Western Union was first approached about setting up a telephone system it regarded the prospect of the telephone’s being present in almost every home and business place as a fantasy and rejected the offer. In most places these days the phone system is a government utility, though in the United States and in many Third World countries it is run by private companies, often U.S. corporations. At present the telephone network is undergoing an interesting mixture of deregulation and reregulation, all the more confusing because the first is sometimes described as the latter. Though in most Western countries more than 90 percent of the population have one or more phones in their residences, where there is more than a token cost involved in hooking up many people, the mobile young, more so than immigrants or the poor, are unconnected. We are also in the midst of significant changes in the world of telecommunications. With the coming of cellular models, the telephone is becoming ubiquitous: we can now take it with us virtually everywhere. When it is hooked up to a fax machine it can send documents quickly verbatim, and a video connection sets up the possibility of teleconferencing. Attached to a modem and computer, it enables workers to engage in telecommuting and can send large amounts of material in the briefest amount of time.

In all these ways the telephone has become an indispensable part of modern life. It has played a major role in maintaining cohesion as settlement spread and connected rural and urban areas in vital ways. It has changed the nature of how business operates, as well as how news is gathered, crime investigated and law enforced. It has changed the context and to some extent even the meaning of friendship and neighborhood. It helped pave the way for radio and television, and now for the fax and the Internet. It has altered patterns of leisure activity and affected the handling of everyday crisis and routine. But what are its main uses, and who uses it most? How much has it destroyed face-to-face community, and how much has it kept other forms of community alive? To what extent is it an accomplice of the consumer society and a primary cause of our pressured lifestyle? What role has it played in secularizing life or in furthering Christian ends? Until the last couple of decades there has been little discussion of these issues, largely because the telephone was taken for granted.

From a spiritual or theological point of view scarcely a thought has been given to the telephone, unless to see it as a way of directly advertising the gospel to people in their homes or providing them with valuable crisis counseling services. When it was becoming more widely available in the earlier part of the century, only groups such as the Amish debated its value. Some leaders warned of its dangers, arguing that it would subvert face-to-face community and allow the secular world to intrude too much into the life of discipleship. There was a church split among the Amish over this, and Old Order Mennonites avoided this only by forbidding church leaders to own a telephone or members to enter hotels to use one. Quaint though this may seem to us, at stake was a vital issue: the extent to which such groups would permit the wider world to compete with established and highly symbolic patterns of communication centered in the shared life of the home and congregation.

The Nature of Telephone Conversations

Telephone conversation takes place for a variety of reasons. The most common distinction is between what are termed intrinsic and instrumental purposes. The first has a social purpose, giving people opportunity to talk about their interests, concerns, experiences and relationships. The second has a task orientation, enabling people to further their work or make some arrangement. In homes the first kind of conversation dominates, especially among women, who use the telephone around seven times more for intrinsic purposes than instrumental. Even at home, however, men tend to use the phone in a task-oriented way. Instrumental conversation dominates in workplaces, though the telephone is occasionally used for social ends. Many conversations are a mixture of the two.

The first kind of conversation is used to build on and extend existing networks of relationships. Women in particular, even though they do not talk as personally over the telephone as they do in each other’s company, employ it to hold together the fabric of the family and friends and to carry out important voluntary caregiving activities, often with those who are lonely, ill or in need. The telephone is especially important to those who do not have much face-to-face contact with others, such as the elderly, handicapped and infirm, and those for whom social contact is extremely important, such as single mothers, teenagers and troubled people. People moving into retirement homes use their telephones to keep in touch with friends and family, and sometimes for shopping. Immigrants, especially women, use it to build a female support neighborhood and also to bring language instruction within their reach.

There are other forms of communication by telephone. For example, it is commonly used, especially by teenagers, to play pranks. And it also can be a means of harassment.

Obviously, then, the telephone brings with it some difficulties. Those who have poor English depend on others to answer it and talk for them, those who are partly deaf cannot always hear properly, and those who have speaking problems cannot always make themselves understood. Most people feel guilty if they do not answer the telephone when it rings, or get frustrated when they call but succeed in reaching only an answering machine or voicemail. The telephone can make life too busy, intruding even on family meals, leisure times and periods of prayer and meditation. Salespeople can enter the home unannounced through it and take up time and energy. Children can get access to types of calls that are unfit for them or rack up large telephone bills by dialing out-of-state friends.

According to surveys, the things people particularly appreciate about the telephone, in order of importance, are its convenience, the way it saves time, ongoing contact with family and friends, opportunities for gossip, overcoming feelings of isolation and loneliness, reducing the tyranny of distance, saying things they could not say in person, accessing information without emotional consequences, avoiding small talk, the expression of feelings and a sense of security. What people especially dislike, again in order of importance, are its expense, interruptions at any time, intrusions on privacy, calls from strangers, frustrations in getting through to people, uncertainty about what to say, over-convenience, its impersonal nature or its having brought bad news. Answering machines, it seemed, created as many difficulties as they resolved.

Putting the Telephone in Its Place

The telephone, then, plays a significant social role in the modern world. It has both significant relational and operational uses over a wide range of people and fields. Perhaps in the spiritual realm the closest analogue to the telephone is prayer, for it too is an extraordinarily wide-reaching, multipurpose, communally formative, yet individually valued, phenomenon. One of the unexpected findings of surveys that have been undertaken is the important psychological functions that telephone calls play: making people feel wanted, needed, included and involved, and in general the opportunity to be social and keep in touch. In other words, telephones seem to contribute to people’s self-esteem and experience of community. On the other hand, sometimes people feel that the telephone uses them, as when they sense they must answer it, are manipulated, encounter insensitivity, waste time on it or become addicted to using it. In these ways it turns people themselves into machines and leads them to feel insignificant.

All this suggests that the telephone is a two-edged sword, but one that is far more positive an invention than it is negative. As yet most people are only dimly aware of its complex impact and its wide realm of uses. Many don’t even consider how to maximize its advantages and avoid its disadvantages. With regard to the latter, the following practical suggestions can help:

• Have only one phone for the family, and learn the art of sharing, self-discipline and sensitivity to other’s needs.

• Use the phone only when necessary; visit rather than phone those working for or with you if they are in the next room.

• Tell people not to call you between certain hours. This helps both you and them establish boundaries for phone use.

• Don’t answer the phone at mealtimes, even if you eat alone. When eating it is important to have time with others or to yourself.

• Preserve leisure time from intrusion by work-related calls. This means keeping cellular phones in their place.

• Interrupt politely and hang up immediately on all junk calls. This is your right, for they are invading your privacy.

• Give priority to people present with you over incoming calls from others. Answering machines can be a real help here.

• When necessary use answering machines to screen incoming calls. Or try providing family and friends with a recognizable signal.

• Fast from the phone occasionally for a day, a weekend or a holiday. This prevents addiction and keeps it in proper perspective.

Such guidelines will help you make the phone a servant rather than a master.

» See also: Technology

References and Resources

S. Aronson, “The Sociology of the Telephone,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 12 (1971) 153-67; D. Bell, “Toward a Sociology of Telephones and Telephoners,” in Sociology and Everyday Life, ed. M. Truzzi (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968); G. Gumpert and R. Cathcart, eds., Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); J. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); I. de Sola Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).

—Robert Banks