Alone together

As upgrades made party-lines more popular in the 1940s, local telephone companies ran frequent ads to instill community spirit and personal courtesy in party-line subscribers.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

“Think how we spend our leisure time now compared to 10 years ago: alone with our Netflix, Instagram, Spotify. No wonder our mental health is eroding and we seem to hate everyone else.’’

-- Gerard Baker in his Dec. 20-21 essay in The Wall Street Journal, “Farewell to the 2010s, the Uneasy Decade of Populism’’

A few years ago, we had a nice family to lunch. They’re a very internationalized crew. Anyway, what struck me in almost comic form was that they were spending much of the meal on their new smart phones, making global travel plans and otherwise communicating with the wide world. (The very ugly table around which we sat, by the way, has quite a history: It was made in a French military prison in Lebanon in the 1920s. My wife bought it off the daughter of the French army officer in charge of the prison.)

I thought of that meal the other day when I came upon a story in The Atlantic magazine about land line phones. Before smart phones, most households had one or at the most two phones. Families had to share them, and the phones were generally in such public places as the living room, the kitchen or the front hall. So there was much less privacy than with cell phones and so more communal family knowledge. Now, phones tend to keep us separated. But then, this is part of a broader tendency to eschew physical person-to person communication in favor of communication via screens. By making it easier to avoid having to become habituated to real, face-to-face contact, these digital devices seem to lead to more and more people being anxious when, for instance, being interviewed in person (not on Skype!) for jobs. HR people tell me that some young job applicants avoid looking at their interviewers in the eyes.

I’m old enough to remember when small towns (including the one I lived in, Cohasset, Mass.) had “party lines’’ that enabled operators of what was called “The Phone Company” (a tightly regulated monopoly) to monitor phone calls and do such things as telling pranksters (usually kids) to hang up, or to call an ambulance. It was truly a community service. It wasn’t always a very efficient system but it could be pretty entertaining, and some family disasters were averted through the heroic efforts of operators at their switchboards.=

A cousin of this phenomenon is the dearth of working people taking the time (or being allowed to take the time) to go to lunch with workmates and others; rather, they eat their lunches at their desk. Thus another opportunity for maintaining social skills falls by the wayside.

Maybe a nice New Year’s Day resolution would have been to spend a bit more time with people in the flesh. But cellphones and computers are engineered to be addictive….

To read the article in The Atlantic, please hit this link.