Scientific American - 11.2019

(Nancy Kaufman) #1
26 Scientific American, November 2019

VENTURES
THE BUSINESS OF INNOVATION

Wade Roush is the host and producer of Soonish, a podcast
about technology, culture, curiosity and the future. He
is a co-founder of the podcast collective Hub & Spoke and
a freelance reporter for print, online and radio outlets,
such as MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, WBUR and WHYY.

Illustration by Jay Bendt

Requiem for the


Telephone Call


Can you really “reach out and touch
someone” via text?

By Wade Roush

The world’s first telephone call—“Mr. Watson, come here, I want
to see you”—was a request for a face-to-face meeting.
I live in Boston, where Alexander Graham Bell made that his-
toric call in 1876, and on a recent trip I passed through Brant-
ford, Ontario, where Bell first dreamed up his telephone in 1874.
In Brantford, which bills itself as the “Telephone City,” there’s a
giant memorial to Bell that includes a bronze casting with fig-
ures meant to represent Knowledge, Joy and Sorrow—the vari-
eties of information spread by the telephone.
Today maybe we should reserve a bit of sorrow for the weak-
ening of the personal connections fostered by Bell’s miracu-
lous invention.
We own more “phones” than ever, but we don’t use them pri-
marily for voice calls. In 2010 Americans spent 2.24 trillion min-
utes talking on their mobile devices—which averages out to


7,813 minutes per mobile line. By 2017 that had
dropped to just 5,539 minutes per line, or 6,686 min-
utes per U.S. resident.
That’s still 18 minutes per person per day, but it’s
a small slice of the five hours a day we spend doing
other things on our mobile devices: watching You-
Tube and TikTok, browsing Facebook and Twitter,
sending text messages, and all the rest. So at the in -
quest over the falloff in voice communication, Exhib-
it A is digital data. We consumed 28.6 trillion mega-
bytes of data on our phones in 2018, a dramatic
82 percent increase over 2017 levels, according to the
wireless industry group CTIA.
Exhibit  B is robocalls. YouMail, which makes a
robocall-blocking app, says that 4.7 billion calls were
placed to U.S. phone numbers in July 2019 alone, an
average of 14 per person. My own phone log shows
that I got 36 spam calls that month—so many that
I’ve started ignoring all unscheduled or unidenti-
fied calls.
In July the U.S. House of Representatives voted
429–3 to approve a bill that would allow carriers to
block suspected robocallers and require them to
implement authentication technology to screen out
calls from spoofed numbers. The Senate had already
passed a similar bill, and the White House is expect-
ed to approve a joint version this fall. Representative
Frank Pallone, Jr., of New Jersey, chair of the Energy
and Commerce Committee, predicted the measure will “restore
Americans’ confidence in the telephone system.”
But the truth is, it’s too late for that. An entire generation of
Americans has grown up using phones as glorified pagers. Many
people in this group would rather not receive calls at all; speak-
ing on the phone “demands their full attention when they don’t
want to give it,” as Sherry Turkle observed in Alone Together, her
incisive 2011 book about the social price of the mobile revolution.
And to make a call is often seen as tantamount to aggres-
sion—a point that’s satirized in a recent episode of Netflix’s
Tales of the City. Sixtysomething Brian is about to call a poten-
tial blind date when his fortysomething neighbor Wren grabs
his phone out of his hand. “What the hell are you doing?” she
exclaims. “I said reach out! That’s text! I mean, this is the 21st
century. Who’s calling someone, you damn psychopath?”
But what’s lost when texts and posts replace conversation is,
briefly put, Joy and Sorrow: the emotional content conveyed by
the human voice. Stripped of this real-time engagement, we’re
left only with Knowledge, which, as the past few years have
shown, is so easily warped and misrepresented. Our telephones
may have evolved into machines for 24/7 tweeting and texting,
but we’re more alone than ever.

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