Where did all the phone booths go?
I was watching the 1966 movie “Blow-Up” the other night, and I saw one of the characters engage in an activity that may have seemed peculiar to today’s teenagers.
A London photographer, played by David Hemmings, stepped into a phone booth, and he made a telephone call.
He did it without using a cell phone.
I grew up in an era when phone booths dotted the American landscape. They’d first appeared in this country in 1889 in a bank in Connecticut. By the early 1900s, there were 81,000 of them across the United States.
By the middle of the 20th Century, they had become an accepted part of the American culture. Clark Kent first used one of them to transform himself into Superman in a cartoon in 1941, and then in a Sunday newspaper comic strip in 1942.
Alfred Hitchcock helped save the life of Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedron, by having her shield herself from attacking sea gulls in the 1963 classic – “The Birds.”
In 2002, Colin Farrell starred in a thriller that put a single phone booth at the center of the narrative titled “Phone Booth.”
Farrell’s character – Stu Shepard – was forced to stand motionless in a phone booth, while a sniper, played by Keifer Sutherland, threatened to shoot him unless he admitted he’d been involved in some philandering.
There was even a 2011 documentary – “The Last Phone Booth” – that examined the demise of that once integral part of the world’s telecommunications.
Now, to the heart of this. Phone booths had always provided a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you ever wanted to make a telephone call, and conduct it in private, phone booths were always the easy answers for those things.
Cell phones, which according to a recent Pew Research Poll, are used by 91 percent of American adults, and they’ve torn down those walls of privacy. Instead of carrying on discussions with your office, or with your friends and relatives out of the earshot of others, cell phones don’t make those kinds of conversations readily possible.
People make free use of them in any public spaces, and apparently without the fear of other people listening. Sidewalks, malls, buses, airplanes, restaurants, supermarkets, movie theatres, and, yes, even restrooms, can be used to make you the involuntary sounding-boards for deeply personal conversations.
I know it might be deeply troubling for some Americans to know that the NSA might be snooping on their personal lives. But many, many Americans don’t seem to be the least bit inhibited when it comes to blurting out the sale they just found on laxatives at Giant Eagle. (Not that a sale on laxatives is a bad thing. I just don’t think hearing about it should be an essential part of my overall supermarket shopping experience)
Then there’s Facebook. I’ll admit, I’m a subscriber. I’ll also admit, I’ve never even met half of my Facebook “friends.” They just happen to be the friends-of-the-friends-of-some-acquaintances of mine. I don’t even know where most of them live.
So, therefore, I’m free with information about my past, but I’m careful about filtering the information I share about my present.
I’ve never quite understood why some of the people who use Facebook, “share” their daily personal travails. I don’t care what the problems are of the friends-of-friends-of-some-acquaintances of mine. So what, if you don’t like it when people refuse to use their turn signals. And will they please stop posting pictures of the hernia scars?
With Facebook, comes the most bizarre new technological advance called Foursquare. Not the wonderful game we all played as kids called Four Square. Foursquare, in contemporary terms, allows people to go places, and to use an app on their cell phones, to let people on Facebook know where they are at the time.
I’ll pass on that one. Why, if many of my Facebook “friends” aren’t really my friends, would I let them know that I’m not home, and that I’m really at a movie theatre 10 miles from home?
That simply doesn’t make much sense.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net