Funeral for a Friend By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN The New York Times October 29, 2010
I started to distrust telephones the instant they stopped working. I can't pinpoint when that was - the first time I "dropped" a call, or someone said, "I'm losing you" - and I don't know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned. I do remember clearly what life was like when telephones worked. What a many-splendored experience it once was to talk on the phone. You'd dial a number, rarely more than seven digits, typically known by heart and fingers. You'd refrain from calling after 9 p.m. or "during dinner"; there were many ideas of politeness around phones, and those ideas helped people pretend that the emotional chaos telephones fostered by all that ungoverned, nonpresentational, mouth-to-ear speech - like whispering across great distances - didn't exist. ... https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31fob-medium-t.html _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
