BT's plans to hike up charges for landline use, coupled with our modern reliance on mobiles, texting and email, could spell the death of the traditional phone call. And our lives will never be quite the same
Jess Cartner-Morley The Guardian, Wednesday 23 March 2011
Marilyn Monroe on the phone in Some Like It Hot. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
Not so long ago, it was the stuff of nightmares: you pick up the landline and there's no dialling tone. Nothing. The phone is useless, dead in your hand. For most of the 20th century, this was a horror film cliche, a symbol of isolation and doom foretold.
But just 15 years after Drew Barrymore answered her kitchen phone to her killer in the very first scene of the first Scream movie, the death of the landline is close to being a reality and one entirely of our own making. BT has announced plans to hike charges for landline calls, in a bid to maintain commercial viability for landline services. The move suggests that BT which has long promoted the emotional case for landlines over mobile calls, with the tagline "if a conversation is worth having, have it on your BT landline" may have given up on turning back the clock. In the US, the proportion of households that have mobile phone connection but no landline has risen to a quarter. The most recent decent-sized research in the UK, in 2007, put the equivalent figure at 15%, but the number is likely to have since risen.
My landline rarely rings these days. And even when it does, I usually don't answer it. It seems like an increasingly alien concept, picking up a phone without knowing who is on the other end, so as often as not I let the answerphone pick up. Oh, and I never, ever listen to landline answerphone messages. My reasoning is that a message left at a house when someone's not even there must by definition be so non-urgent that it doesn't need listening to. I assume that if anyone actually needs me, they will reach me on my mobile, or by text or email. And this, at the grand old age of 37. For millions of today's twentysomethings, who have had a mobile number since their teens and for whom a landline makes no practical sense during the transient years before they settle down, the moment of opting into landline-owning may never come if it becomes an expensive extra. My sister and my closest colleague, for instance, both have grown-up jobs and mortgages, but no landlines.
The demise of the landline has gone almost unnoticed. After all, the din of mundane phone chatter is all around us on the bus, at the next table in Pret. What difference does it make whether the cables lie underground or not?
A lot, actually. The death of the landline is a cultural shift that affects our personal and public lives. It has untethered us from our groupings in the office, where email has disconnected us from what the people who sit three feet away do all day, and even more significantly, at home. In any household in the days before mobiles took over, the landline served as a switchboard for everyone's connections outside the home. The phone rang, you answered it, you asked who was calling, and then you passed the phone over. Everyone knew who called you, and how long you spoke for. Within families, couples, flatmates, it was a kind of invisible knowledge map about the state of everyone's romantic and social lives, and one we took for granted. Now, we are all freelance operatives. In my early teens, we had a kitchen phone and an upstairs phone but even the act of transferring a call to another line spoke volumes. My children's teenage dramas will never be as transparent to me in the way mine must have been to my parents.
'Do you have any idea how much this call is costing?' Drew Barrymore in Scream. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
And devoted though we are to our mobiles, most of the time we aren't talking but typing. Comic Relief this year heavily promoted the option to donate by text, to save you having to actually speak to anyone. Office culture has become increasingly silent. As someone who learned how to do my job as a junior by listening to people around me editors commissioning, writers interviewing, fixers cajoling I wonder how today's young people learn the ropes. Now that the corner-office is as retro as Mad Men, open-plan culture demands a level of quiet. But it's odd, on a personal as well as a professional level. When I started work, you knew everything about the person who sat next to you, because they had no choice but to conduct their relationships with their lover, their mother, their bank manager from their desk phone, while you had no choice but to pretend not to listen. These days, all you overhear is the clatter of typing, the lull while they wait for a response, and then the rapt concentration when the emailed reply appears.
Enough with the rose-tinted nostalgia for the landline. After all, it's not as if the era of the one-landline household, the 1950s to 1980s, coincided with a blissful time of unalloyed family and community harmony. But with the demise of a shared line we all become a little more unassailable in our individual worlds, and less available. The mobile phone, with its haughty "ignore" button, is an opt-in form of communication. Email has made it increasingly acceptable to break news that people don't want to hear while opting out of having to listen to them hearing what you have to say, and empathise with their response. Saying what you think and hitting send is not the same as having a conversation.
There is a line in the film The September Issue when Anna Wintour's publisher says of her that "she doesn't make herself accessible to people she doesn't need to be accessible to". By not answering our landlines, we bring a little of that ruthlessness into our home lives. We expect to communicate on our own terms, and at a time that suits us. If I don't answer the landline because I'm putting the kids to bed, fair enough. But if I don't answer it because I'm exhausted and I don't feel like talking, or because the film I want to watch is about to start . . . ? If I stop to think about it, that's pretty selfish. Add to that the fact that many people I asked said that the only people who called their landlines were older relatives, and there's a slightly callous edge to our willingness to let it ring and ring.
It would be sad if, having crammed our lives full of texting, tweeting and status updates, we no longer have the energy to speak to people who want to talk to us. There are repercussions of cutting ourselves in or out of the loop as we please, because real community doesn't work like that. Interestingly, relatively new forms of online interaction, such as Twitter and BBM instant-messaging, have returned to a more conversational, back-and-forth style, rather than the hit-and-run approach of sending an email. Horror films have moved on from the snipped landline to the dreaded out-of-battery/low-signal plot device. But in real life, we're all running scared from a ringing phone.
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