Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
I remember Ma Bell, the bizarrely affectionate name for the old Bell System network, including AT&T. The "Ma" was because it was the mother of all telecommunications monopolies until the Feds broke it up.
I still remember the "gossip bench" where our hefty black phone sat. The bench had a built-in alcove to hold the Brooklyn phone books — both the white and yellow pages (resident and busi- ness directories).
Like a blaring siren, the sound of a ringing phone has always triggered a vague sense of dread in me, Heaven help us.
As John Donne wrote in 1623, "Send not to know/For whom the bell tolls." The ringing phone brings a momentary pause, a deep breath, and then a scramble to answer it.
Once, when I called an aunt of mine, instead of, "Hello," she answered the phone, "What's the matter?"
In a 1962 play by Gerald Gardner, the main character walks into his bedroom, where the phone is ringing loudly. With a toothbrush stuck in his mouth, he grabs the phone and says, "Is this somebody with good news or money? No? Goodbye."
And he slams down the phone.
I'm one of those who love to hate the smartphone. I still refuse to use one. Even before the religious issues came to light, I resisted buying one. I told a sales rep trying to push a smartphone on me, "I like smart people and dumb phones."
Between you and me, I'm not ready for the 21st century. But the problem started long ago.
Around 1950, Harry Golden attacked what he called "the tyranny of the telephone." (Yes, I swiped his title; but I don't swipe phones.)
The world got along fine without phones, Golden insisted. "The New York Stock Exchange did business for nearly a full century before the telephone was invented; and you wonder how they built the railroads, stretched the country across a continent, got married, and raised families without the telephone. But they did. …"
By the 1950s, the tool had already taken over. Golden observed, "There's something about it that only a trained psychologist could explain. You receive a letter and you either open it or leave it unopened, as you wish. You put it in your pocket, or in your apron, or in a bureau drawer. It awaits your pleasure. … But let that phone ring and … in summer and winter, in bed or out of bed, in the bathtub or up on the roof, you make a beeline for that instrument, over hill and dale, in the darkness with the furniture falling to the left and the right; nothing matters except to reach that instrument."
I used to refer to cellphones as walkie-talkies. Galvin Manufacturing (later changed to Motorola) introduced two-way radios in 1940 and walkie- talkies in 1943, for the military. They helped win the war. Their domestic cousin invaded the home front.
By that time, phones were already predominant (and dominant) in every American home. And they were already well-hated. Back in 1890, Mark Twain wrote a letter to the editor of New York Evening World, saying, "It is my heart-warm and world-embracing … hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage, may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone."
As I get older, and my hearing gets worse, I particularly relate to Twain's line, "Confound a telephone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense."
During the 1800s, telephone poles started stretching across the country. Instead of leaves, the lifeless trees sprouted miles and miles of wires. They were ugly wooden towers of Babel.
Worse, they encroached on property rights. Farmers, land owners, and homeowners threatened to tear them down. Don't mess with the American territorial imperative. Manifest destiny rights were never granted to the phone companies.
But the telephone tyrants won. The barbarians staged a bloodless coup.
I remember telephone poles holding up the ends of the clotheslines stretching over the courtyards from the back windows of my Brooklyn apartment house.
Other people still have family memories of friends and relatives being lynched from telephone poles. Don't ask me how those people ever brought themselves to use a telephone.
Some of us always had a healthy distrust of technology. The Talmudic sage, Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld, zt"l, was raised in Brooklyn in the 1930s. When his mother bought a refrigerator to replace her old ice box, there was no room in the kitchen for the fridge, so they had to set it up in the living room.
She plugged in the refrigerator, plopped herself in a chair, crossed her arms, and said, "I want to see that's going to get cold!"
More to our point, in 1858, The New York Times ran an article about the new transatlantic telegraph. They questioned the value of such an enterprise: "Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mail from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column?"
But smartphones are more than a mere annoyance. They have a dark side that threatens the very way we think.
Nicholas Carr outlined the dangers in a Wall Street Journal article, "How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds."
"The smartphone is unique in the annals of personal technology. We keep the gadget within reach more or less around the clock, and we use it in countless ways, consulting its apps and checking its messages and heeding its alerts scores of times a day. The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are."
A 1970s campaign by the United Negro College Fund (UNCF ) was built on the slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." In a speech to the UNCF in 1989, Dan Quayle misquoted the phrase as, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind."
My advice? Hang up the phone. The mind you save may be your own.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Mordechai Schiller is a columnist and award-winning headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared.
Previously:• A Bittere Gelechter: Gallows-, Galus-, and Grief-Humor
• Disbelief --- and the mission of the faithful
• The 'Mysterious' Jerusalem Sage and his kid brother
• Garbage In, Garbage Out
• My Un-Birthday
• How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Waze
• Truthgate
• In the Scheme of Things
• Funny, It's Not
• Ready, Aim, Pray!
• Time Whorf
• Fathers Days
• The Elephant in The Kids' Room
• Beware the Ice of March
• The Theory of Negativity
• Truth Ache
• Holy Humor
• CAUTION: Joking Hazard
• Kludge Fixtures
• Canditedium: Just don't call me disinterested
• In Sanity: How Members of the Tribe do craziness
• You gotta like a guy who can 'feel or act' another's feelings in the mind's muscles --- still …
• The World of Words is Changing --- OY! What's a Jew to do?
• Unruly: Dos, Jews, and don'ts
• 'Noodging' Is Sacred
• Manipulated or Convinced?
• Lost in Translation
• Holy Tongue