Just after the holiday Monday, I walked into my favourite local bookstore – Blue Heron Books – to find its proprietor on the phone. She looked as if she were having a lively conversation. She was as animated as she usually is when anybody drops into the store for a book or to talk about a book. As I got closer I realized that, no, the conversation was one-way. She was essentially leaving a message for a book representative or a publicist.
“So if you can get back to me,” Shelley Macbeth said, “maybe we can work out a way to stage the event.” And she hung up the phone, rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. Clearly, the experience was unsatisfactory.
I lamented to Shelley that it’s too bad people don’t talk to each other anymore, that we’ve resorted to communicating by leaving voice mail for each other, or tapping out coded messages on computer keyboards as e-mail, or, more than likely these days, “twittering” text messages in more abbreviated and clipped language than even an e-mail message allows. I mean, how many times has someone on the other end of the telephone line cut short a conversation by saying:
“Why don’t you just e-mail me and I’ll get back to you.” Which is short for “I can’t be bothered talking to you. I feel less threatened if I sit at a computer keyboard and compose an answer later, rather than deal with you person-to-person right now.”
Much as his descendant corporation – Bell Canada and its various subsidiaries – have continued to profit by his original, crude “phonotograph” invented in 1874, Alexander Graham Bell must be spinning in his grave at the state of phone conversation.
It’s almost exactly 150 years ago that the brilliant Scottish-born inventor entreated his faithful colleague Thomas Watson, “Come here, I need you.” From that transmitted phrase came telephone bills, party lines, faxes, that long-distance feeling, cell phones and even micro-waved voice technology from astronauts on the moon. The sky was literally the limit, thanks to his original telephone.
But Mr. Bell wasn’t the only famous telephone conversationalist.
The top-secret chats that Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt shared by trans-Atlantic telephone probably changed the fate of the world during the Second World War. And speaking of world security, diplomacy in the 1970s would not have existed without the telephone conversations that then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had with presidents Nixon and Ford; indeed, the U.S. National Security Archive houses over 30,000 telephone transcript pages of conversations the esteemed Dr. Kissinger had with such personalities as Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, journalist Ted Koppel and show-business pal Frank Sinatra – all in the interest of national security.
But no longer an up-close-and-personal device, the telephone (and the voice communication that it fostered) have fallen out of favour, particularly with a young generation, that would just as soon chat online, text or twitter with each other, as opposed to actually talking to anybody.
I remember a few years ago, when I began teaching young journalists about beat reporting, that is, short-term, highly focused and very intense reporting on specific subjects (beats) such as education, politics, health, etc. When budgeting the beat reporting semester, we factored in long-distance calls we expected our students might place during the course of their 15-week pursuit of beat reporting sources. We were astonished when our college telephone bills hadn’t spiked at all. Indeed, our students had conducted barely any long-distance interviews at all, preferring instead to interview by e-mail.
Why? We subsequently learned that our young charges preferred the safety of e-mail billboards, or chat rooms, or worse still – question-and-answer sessions conducted entirely at computer keyboards. The students’ improvised dodging of direct contact with their sources, made it easier for them to deal with their fear of failure. But it also made for lower quality reporting.
To combat the apparent phone phobia and to ensure that our reporters got over their fears and got better stories, we insisted – from then on – that all interviews had to be conducted face-to-face or at least by telephone. I have to report, several years later, there remain some students who still refuse to pick up the phone to talk to their sources.
Which brings me back to Shelley Macbeth’s one-way conversation with her book rep. Maybe before making any commitment – least of all on a telephone – people should expect to hear from a real live, speaking person.
But, what a minute. That’s where telemarketing came into the picture. That’s one live phone voice I’d just as soon “twitter” into oblivion.
