22 hours ago
5
Among the many useless but consoling facts I’ve hung on to at the expense of real knowledge is the telephone number of my best friend from high school. I can say it in my head – 612505 – and, like a combination lock, it throws open the door to a memory of me sitting on the stairs after school, yakking to the person I’d just said goodbye to on the bus. Given it’s more than 30 years since I used that number, I have to assume it will stay with me – along with the lyrics to the Cadbury’s Roses ad from 1983, the name of the fictional head teacher of Summer Bay High (Mr Fisher) and my own telephone number from that era (623492) – until the day I die.
I hadn’t given much thought to landlines or the teenage experience of sitting on them after school every day, until a recent piece in the Atlantic shared the results of a small, highly localised experiment: in Portland, Maine, a parent nervous of giving her 10-year-old child a smartphone took the eccentric step of reintroducing a landline, and then persuaded the parents of her child’s friends to do the same. Before she knew it, between 15 and 20 families in the area had reinstalled landlines for their preteens in what the Atlantic called a “retro bubble”. Charming scenes ensued, communications habits changed, and everyone learned a valuable lesson about the advantages of ancient technology.
The funny thing about this is that unlike the brick phone, another answer to the puzzle of how to keep children off social media, the families of Portland discovered that the very thing that limits the landline – the fact it’s attached to the wall – turned out to be one of its big attractions. Most families put the phone in a high-traffic area of the house, keeping their kid at least notionally in the mix rather than shut away in their room. This was a tactic popular in the early days of home computers, when parents would put the family’s single, giant desktop on a table in the kitchen so the kid wasn’t isolated or left alone with “the internet”, a healthy instinct that smartphones effectively killed.
For the kids involved, pivoting to landlines entailed a conceptual leap as big as any they’d encountered: the amazing Russian roulette of having to pick up a ringing phone to discover who was on the other end; the mediation experience of having to say hello to a parent and ask politely to be put through to their child; the need to memorise a number; and the wildest thing of all, trying to remember that phoning a friend on a landline meant that, if they picked up, they could only possibly be in one place, so that shouting “ARE YOU HOME?!” down the phone, as one young case study did, made no sense whatsoever (but was very funny).
None of the families involved had an interest in reducing the contact their children had with their friends. But they were concerned with the issue of distraction – that kids speaking to each other on smartphones are often scrolling at the same time – and one of the reported findings was that the old-fashioned phones encouraged them to become “better listeners”. For anyone who grew up getting home from school, changing out of their uniform and getting straight on the phone to carry on the conversation they’d broken off an hour earlier, this idea of extracting formal skills and takeaways from basic behaviours seems part of the broader parenting shift towards turning every last thing into an effing learning experience.
On the other hand, I get it; the appeal of old phones is rooted in nostalgia but also in the idea that there is something wholesome about the relative transparency of landlines and returning to a way of doing things that, while it annoyed parents back in the day, didn’t strike the fear of God into them. Pre-mobile phones, the main anxiety suffered by parents with kids who were forever on the phone was that they were going to “run up the bill”, “tie up the line”, or fritter their life away gossiping, all adorably quaint concerns. No one can groom or catfish a child via a hunk of plastic attached to the wall.
What was the takeaway for us, who grew up on landlines? I guess if mobiles these days exert an enormous gravitational pull in our pockets, still some other order of magic existed around the old landlines. “I’ll get it!”; “it’s for me!”; redundant phrases now that, back then, spoke to the tiny thrill of election that came from receiving a call via the family phone – and like ghosts from the deep past, the lifelong dedication to memory of the numbers.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
