Telephone

I know I’m dating myself here, but when I was a very young aspiring reporter, one of the lessons mentors and teachers tried to impart was how to make sure you could find a pay phone if you were out covering a breaking story.

One teacher at a summer program for high school journalists told us that when we arrived on the scene, the first thing we should do was find a bathroom and a pay phone. And, she added, tongue in cheek or maybe not, chew some gum and stick it to the phone’s coin slot so no one else could use it.

Now I can’t remember the last time I used a pay phone, or even saw one that appeared to be in good working order. And I have no idea how much a local call would cost.

Like so many other changes, it seems like it happened gradually, then all at once. When I was out of college and working as a reporter, our phones didn’t have voicemail and we didn’t have email. If we wanted to reach someone, we called, and usually they — or a receptionist — answered. If they seemed to be dodging our calls, we showed up on their doorsteps.

The job of a reporter hasn’t changed that much; it still involves figuring out what information you need to tell your audience, what they need to know or would enjoy knowing, and then talking to people to get the information.

I still interview lots of people by phone; the difference now is, most of the time those phone calls are scheduled appointments, usually starting with an email.

People a generation younger than me seem to find it rude to call without warning, even for personal chats. My adult kids most often text me if they have something to tell or ask me; if they just want to talk, they’ll usually text to see if I’m available for a call.

Calls without warning now ring alarm bells; they are having an emergency, probably. Maybe a fender-bender, or, in the case of my high schooler, they forgot a book and can I drop it off? Not all emergencies are created equal.

We’re always on our phones, but not so much on phone calls. As far as I can tell, teens don’t get to the stage of sharing actual phone numbers until they are what people in another age would have called “intimate friends.” Until then, they communicate over the multitude of apps that include messaging and voice and video calls. And they look at their parents, exchanging numbers with their friends’ parents so we can keep in touch, like we’re the crazy ones.

It makes me nostalgic for my childhood, when kids on the block would just randomly show up at the door asking if we could come out to play, back when there was only one phone in the house. But then, the idea of video calling someone in another country for an interview for a story seemed like something out of the Jetsons, and probably very expensive.

I like having the ability to communicate across distance. I like having access to the wider world, no chewed gum necessary. But it’s important, I think, to use those tools to build community instead of just using them to build distance.