This is a lament for the landline, a rhapsody for its dial tone, a hymn to the way it connected people. It’s the little things we miss. The landline was a focal point of the home, an antidote to atomization and loneliness, those scourges of our age.
The landline was a shared thing. Conversations took place at unplanned moments. Overhearing was unavoidable.
Landlines provided connections that were stable and seemed real, in contrast to cellphone conversations, with their enervating interruptions because of lost reception. The cellphone introduced redialing, sometimes multiple times. The time lost (and the arguments engendered) through frustrating attempts to reconnect is incalculable.
In the landline world there was down time. You left the house, you looked around, yousawpeople, you daydreamed, you got lost, you found your way again, you gazed from the train window at lines of poplars swaying in the mist. Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity. It stretched away, an empty canvas.
Experience occurred, not as a thing to be rated with stars, nor as the prelude to a request for feedback. Sidewalks were not an obstacle course around people absorbed by smartphones. Posture was better. Heads were not bowed in contemplation of thumbs. The end of landlines has been bad for necks. It has been bad for the bonds that form the commons.
People knew where they were in relation to other places on a map. They had their bearings. They were not blue-dot zombies in motion on a navigation system. They could remember landline phone numbers. Kids did not have play dates, they had neighborhoods. In those neighborhoods they played with neighbors’ children. They were not tracked minute by minute.
With landlines came punctuality. You made an appointment, you stuck to it, there was none of the flaky something-better-to-do elasticity constant contact facilitates. Let’s face it, lateness is rude.
