On the Telephone
“Ever tucked your baby in from a phone booth?” asked a commercial from AT&T’s seminal “You Will“, David Fincher-directed, 1993 advertising campaign. A professional-looking woman slides a card into a public payphone and makes a videocall to an infant. A slight burst of video static evoking a similar call in Blade Runner.
That which comes to pass is mostly invisible, we only really recognise flawed predictions. The Back to the Future house of 2015 with a fax machine in every room. In fact, any future in which normal people use payphones. Even in movies from the nineties when cell phones were, to a lesser extent, around you still see them. But this was an era where mobile telephony was a yuppie-marker. Stick a computer or a videocamera in a public booth and it’s shorthand for more widespread technological advancement.
I particularly love the circa-2032 phone booth from 1993′s Demolition Man which offers positive affirmations to its users (“you inspire joy-joy feelings in those around you”), video calls, electronic banking, and encyclopaedia services. Services expected from a circa-2010 smartphone (and search for “affirmation” on the App Store if you don’t believe me).
(Not just movies and ads, of course. I love all those future-projection corporate videos from the 80s and 90s. Almost all of them will feature, at some point, an architect at an airport needing to make some kind of last minute project adjustment. I kind of imagine that we’re now living in a world designed for that specific demographic.)
But, in real life, the phone boxes have become invisible in terms of utility. Billboards with a shape historically determined. Vestigial street-furniture. Bizarro morris columns.
Councils want them gone. They’re considered “attractive to vandals” (rather than as vandalism lightning rods?) and “mainly used by criminals”. (It’s probably not what they mean to imply but, yes, in 2010 anyone without a cellphone is morally suspect.) Market-research on behalf of a cell-phone company suggests that the majority of people expect phone boxes to disappear by 2020. And the majority of those, despite not needing them, will be sad to see them go.
The recent loss of a cellphone reintroduced new visibility for me. Late, alone, walking the streets in search of a working phone box to call my own number. I’d not actually needed to used one in, probably, a decade. A 60p minimum call! I would later hear the voicemail I’d left for anyone who happened to find my phone. “Hi, this is my phone, my name is Lee…” That was 60p.
But if we still have affection for the things, but little actual use, what would justify them hanging around on the street? Dual use? Boxes which incorporate both a phone and a cashpoint exist around London. I remember walking past what was once a payphone location and seeing it had been replaced with a defib unit – yeah, there’s probably far more utility in defibrillation than fixed-telephony these days.
The current “Nike Grid” game utilises phone boxes as waypoints in a running game. Participants “code in” by calling a freephone number from a designated box, run to another and call in again. The time taken between the calls is used to determine the player’s score. I’ve heard it referred to as “Die Hard With a Vengeance, but without the logic puzzles”
Oddly now, having replaced my lost phone with a new iPhone, they’ve become more visible to me. One of the not-completely-seamless experiences of using a smartphone at the moment appears to be in moving between cellular networks and public wifi. Smartphone contracts, in the UK at least, usually offer less than 1GB per month of data, but supplement that with access to public wifi networks such as BT OpenZone. You end up mentally segregating usage based on location, anything small and texty via 3G, uploads and downloads via wifi. So you look around for the likely hotspot locations. Pubs, coffee shops, and, in many cases, phone boxes.
And so, despite owning a phone capable of video calling, restrictions on using Apple’s FaceTime over cellular networks mean that if I wanted to make a video call, whilst out and about, I’d end up looking around for a phone booth.
Future.
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