Bring Back Landline Telephones
Some technologies -- like books, for example -- are perfect and should not be improved upon.
Hi my loves,
I have a proposition, and I ask you to bear with me: For the sake of the children, we should bring back landlines.
I know! I sound nuts! But hear me out.
CELL PHONES BAD
I think we can all agree that cell phones are the source of great misery. Figurately and literally. You probably sleep with yours under your pillow, an umbilical cord to the pulsing nonsense of the never-ending digital world, which has replaced all sorts of meaning and connection in our lives. Hell, I once dropped my iPhone on my sleeping newborn’s face as I tried to use the blue light of the screen to determine whether he was breathing in his bassinette. (OK YES FINE THAT HAPPENED MORE THAN ONCE. BEING A PARENT IS HARD!) We scroll, we swipe, we answer its every ping. Who’s in control in this relationship? IT AIN’T US. When we can’t find our phones we freak out and slam the front door in frustration and scare our children who we are trying to get to swim lessons on time. (OK, maybe that is just me.) We cater to its whims (“can’t join you guys for drinks, my phone is on 2 percent!”). We bought a thing that captured us and now we pretend we love it. It’s Stockholm Syndrome.
For this reason, many parents, myself included, are adamant that we won’t let these pocket-sized life-ruiners near our children until it’s “necessary.” When exactly “necessary” arrives is up for debate. My 11-year-old niece has a cell phone now, and she was one of the latest of her friends. I love it when she texts me but I also die a little inside. She’s on TikTok. She’s not even in middle school yet. Her mom waited as long as she could, but her daughter needs a way to call her friends and family.
I don’t know a lot, but I can tell you this for sure: I would not have survived middle school if cell phones and social media had been around.
When I got my period in 7th grade and my then best friend locked me in a bathroom with only tampons and refused to let me out until I inserted one, which I refused to do so instead I crawled out onto my own roof, walked over the eaves, and swung into the balcony like Spiderman, THAT would have been on Snapchat for sure. Or more likely, I would have had a phone with me and called my Mom, who would have come up stairs and unlocked the door, and then I wouldn’t have this hilarious story to tell.
When I made out with my first real boyfriend — HI LOGAN HOPE YOU ARE WELL! I HEARD YOU GOT MARRIED — in the band storage room in middle school and our friends were snickering outside, THAT would have been on Insta.
When I got a bad haircut the summer before 8th grade and then walked in the first day only for my friend Zac, who had had a crush on me in 6th and 7th, to take one look at me and say, “Emily? What HAPPENED to you?” That would have been on TikTok.
And all the poetry I wrote? The sheaths and sheaths of it that are still kept in big waterproof boxes under my house, and which turned me into the writer I am today, and which got me into college (along with a healthy dose of nepotism, I am finally able to admit)? All of that writing would likely have been sent out in the form of 180-character tweets and then lost forever.
I am grateful all the time that childhood was free of constant digital surveillance and pressure. All I had to do was try to keep up with the fashions on MTV, like everyone else. And sometimes, gloriously, I would stay up late at night on the phone with my best friends, watching music videos together but apart.
And I don’t know about you, but with all this social media implosion and Twitter dying and blahdy blahdy blah, I am not-so-secretly hoping that social media self immolates before my kids reach the age when they’ll ask to join it.
PHONES ARE NOT INHERENTLY BAD
But really, this is not the fault of phones. This is the fault of LAPTOP computers, which first gave humans the idea that computing power, aka work, aka creating content, aka being always reachable and plugged in, SHOULD BE EVERPRESENT AND AVAILABLE AT ALL TIMES. And it was this development that then led phones to become small computers, from which we can Zoom into meetings with UN officials (a thing I have done) as well as play videogames, search for porn, edit photos of our family, buy plane tickets, and crunch data (I assume, I have never “crunched” anything but dry cereal).
Cell phones are not phones at all. Famously, when the cell phone became the dominant mode of communication people began fearing making voice calls. A million think pieces were and are still written about how millennials and some Gen Xers and now Gen Zers are terrified of the phone ringing and will refuse to make voice calls. Google even introduced an AI that will mimic a human voice in order to call restaurants for you to make a reservation, since so many people find that anxiety-inducing.
This is not people’s fault. This is the fault of the EVERYTHING MACHINE we have in our pocket, that through its mediated screen has connected us in every single way to every single person and made us feel at all times like we are seen and accessible and therefore vulnerable. Now asking us to speak, without an intermediary of that screen, to another HUMAN BEING? It becomes daunting. I get it. Though I personally, as you can imagine, have never felt that fear, since I love more than anything to talk and have spent the past 18 years as a journalist, and calling people is still crucial in that gig.
I fucking love calling people. I always have. One of my favorite photos of myself from childhood is me all dressed up to accompany my Dad to the 1996 Oscars, in which he was nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture(TM) for Mr. Holland’s Opus, standing by a window talking on the phone. I’m playing with the phone cord. I am so excited to be doing something so fancy and cool, and I am so excited to take this moment to call my friends and family and express my feelings. (Incidentally, that night Ben, who also came along, brought my Dad’s then-state-of-the-art cellular telephone to the Oscars and was photographed carrying it on the Red Carpet. These images made it into People Magazine, especially after his phone RANG LOUDLY while Steven Spielberg was on stage announcing something about the Holocaust. This, perhaps, is why our family’s stopped being friends?)
In that story already you can see the foreshadowing of what was to come. Cell phones interrupt. They disrupt. They enable us to stay apart for months and months yet feel connected via our thumbs.
Now, landlines on the other hand? They are glorious. In case it’s been a decade or so since you’ve used one, let me remind you how they work:
HOW TO MAKE A CALL ON A LANDLINE
You approach a landline phone at a designated phone area. This area is where you speak to friends, family, and pizza delivery drivers. As such, this area is likely where you’ll find pens and paper to doodle with, and notes left for you from your roommates or parents.
You dial a number. For the people you love and deal with the most, this number is etched into your brain, a physical synaptic expression of your love for them. For others, you have speed dial, or, LOL, a large book in which all numbers are written. Nowadays said book may be your Google Home or Amazon Echo across the room. “Alexa, what’s the number for a trash hauling company in San Francisco!”
You dial by PUSHING real BUTTONS. Oh the glory of it! You can feel them move under your pressure. You are doing this. You are making this device work. It is responding to you.
You listen to the ring. The anticipation builds as you wonder, will my crush answer? Is the pizza place too busy to take my order? Life is so exciting!
“Hello, this is the Whoever Residence,” someone eventually says. Your brain floods with serotonin. They picked up!
“Hi, this is [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE}. May I speak with {INSERT YOUR FRIEND’S NAME HERE),” you say, triumphant.
While you wait for your friend to come to the phone, you twirl the phone cord and notice how beautiful the trees outside your kitchen window look.
Then you sit down on your kitchen floor, your back against the cupboard, and you entwine your voice with another’s, hearing their stories and telling them yours. You are apart but you are actually, by dint of your voices, together.
Oh and don’t even get me started on the excitement of a landline phone ringing!
WHY LANDLINES ARE PERFECT FOR KIDS
I have always told Seth that when our kids were old enough I was going to get them a landline, and he thought all these years that I was joking.
I was not joking.
And our boys, 7 and 3.5 years old, are OBSESSED WITH IT. Last night after bedtime our friend Emma called the landline and both children bolted out of bed with looks of glee on their face. “Someone is calling OUR phone!!!!” (Now I know to turn the ringer off after 8pm.)
And it is their phone. They know that. Huxley, our older son, is learning to dial. Sometimes he messes up his 6s and 9s. Sometimes he dials so slowly that the dial tone goes away and he gets an error message. A lot of the time when his family answers he forget to say who he is, opting instead for a very understated, “hey.” Asa, our younger son, has gotten markedly clearer in his enunciation because he wants so badly to be understood on the phone.
Please, please, parents of Hux and Asa’s friends, if you are reading this, please get a landline so they can chitchat. Remember chitchatting?!?! It was so important!
I finally went ahead and got the phone a few months ago because of something that happened when Seth took Hux to work for the day. Seth runs a bioengineering lab at a big institute in San Francisco, and Hux got to walk around the lab with him all day, and draw on the white board, and sit in on experiment planning meetings, but then at a certain point Seth had to go to someone else’s office. He told Hux that he would be a few doors down and that he’d be back soon. Hux was playing his Nintendo Switch.
What happened next, from Huxley’s telling, was, “I called out to Dad to get me something to eat because I was so hungry and then he didn’t answer and I looked up and realized he was still not here and I thought he had come back because it had been so long and I had no idea where he was so I started crying, and I cried in his office for a while and then I went out into the hallway and cried and someone found me and brought me to Dad.”
There was a phone on Seth’s desk, but Hux had no idea how to use it to call his father up and say, “I’m scared.”
Which made me realize that Hux has no way of calling 911 if he ever needed to. What if I choke on a pickle in the kitchen when we’re home alone? He doesn’t know how to access my cell phone.
So we got a landline. GUYS IT IS SO FUN!!!!!!!!!!!! Now when the kids want to talk to their grandparents, I don’t have to give up my phone (which I am unutterably addicted to lol and no amount of landline can undo that). When the phone rings, they run to answer it. They are practicing their manners and politeness. They are learning about numbers, and sharing, and taking turns on the phone. They are hanging out in the kitchen with me when I cook so that they can be on the phone. It’s literally so great. Cannot recommend it enough.
Thank you for reading,
XOXOXOXOXOXOX Emily
P.S.
Oh, and if you decide to do this, here’s some things I learned: A landline is now basically a luxury commodity, since you will be getting it in addition to your cell phone. In my research I found it can’t really cost less than $50 a month.
Comcast and Verizon offered me no discount to set up a line, even though I’m already their customer. And actually, getting a line from Comcast was going to raise our entire monthly bill by over $100 a month because it would undo some special deal we got. So! I used Community Phone, a startup that was founded to make it easier for old people to get and pay for landlines without having to also get internet service.
Community Phone is great, and works somehow not through wires in the wall, but rather on some wireless spectrum, which means you plug it in and it works, and you don’t need a phone jack of any kind. Also, it was founded by this very earnest nice young student who I met back in 2017 and who tried to get me to write about his “Better Landline Phones for Seniors” startup for WIRED, and who I totally dismissed because that didn’t seem like a real story to me, and also I never liked writing about brand new companies because it felt like an ad, but the kid didn’t need me because the company is thriving, and now I’m a literal customer writing an unsolicited recommendation.
Life comes around.
And so can landlines.
P.P.S.
If you have any great memories of talking on a landline phone, I would love to hear them.
When I think about it I have flashes: me crying to parents on the wall phone at camp asking them to pick me up; me telling Seth I loved him for maybe the first time from a pay phone in Switzerland as the operator said I was running out of time; me crying on an airplane telephone from the middle seat when my high school boyfriend dumped me and I flew home but then got drunk on the plane and called him up; talking to my grandma on the phone while I sat under my desk with my feet in the air; Hearing my Mom’s voice at night when I was away at my Dad’s house and she called to say goodnight.
we still have a landline, mostly because the alarm system needs it. And most of the calls we get are spam. But you've inspired me to press those very real buttons and cherish the moment. And I won't text first "can I call you on the phone"
"You dial by PUSHING real BUTTONS."
Pffft. Back in my day, you had to insert your finger into one of 10 holes, each designating 1 through 9 with zero in the last position, on a large dial and TURN IT clockwise. And you had to do that for EACH digit in the phone number. Oh the inhumanity! It took entire seconds to dial a number. On the upside, the process included the immense joy of the spring-loaded dial spinning backward upon release with a sound that I cannot even begin to ponder how to spell here, but trust me it was lovely.
I will say as a Gen X'er, I hate talking on the phone, but (perhaps naively?) I do not place blame for this on cellphones. Instead, I blame 30-odd (!?!) years in journalism. I have spent SO MUCH time on the phone in those years that, to be honest, I don't want to be bothered. Ping me with a text... it's so much less intrusive. That's not to say I don't talk on the phone - the job requires it, as do filial duties - but in most cases, I prefer text.
And that said, I don't think the broader problem is cellphones, but the apps we put on them. They are designed for addiction. My relationship to my phone, and those around me, changed for the better when I abandoned Twitter and Instagram two years ago (I'd long since given up on Facebook.) I recently, and briefly, returned to Twitter, mostly to watch the dumpster fire, and soon found it becoming just as insidious a presence in my life as before, so I've abandoned it again. Granted, I have an addictive personality to begin with and so the drip-drip-drip of dopamine is particularly enticing to me, so maybe I'm an edge case? Regardless, ditch all social media. That, to me, is the real problem.
Also, CAN WE TALK ABOUT THAT AMAZING OSCARS OUTFIT?