The Telephone’s Tangled History of Intimacy and Control
The New Yorker · Cal Revely-Calder ·
Cal Revely-Calder reviews “The Telephone: A New History,” by James Gleick.
The victim is also you. One of the sinister appeals of “Sorry, Wrong Number”—which was praised by Orson Welles, a “Suspense” regular, as “the greatest single radio script ever written”—is that it makes us newly conscious of the menace lurking in an everyday technology: the telephone. For, as Mrs. Stevenson grows distressed, you become uncomfortably aware of her physical circumstance. Even as she casts her voice many miles away, she’s trapped. Her telephone’s wires have come to constitute the limits of her world. They’re also the limits of your world, you come to see, whenever you place a call yourself. What you know about the people on the other end of the line—their faces, their postures; whom they’re with, where they are, how truthful they’re being—can stretch only as far as what you’re told and what you choose to believe. Beyond that, you’re making inferences in the dark.
This may strike you as a little paranoid. The rise of the telephone, in the past century and a half—from the rotary diallers at home and the boxes in the street to the smartphones in every pocket—is associated with a change that, broadly speaking, we consider positive. The telephone gave us back what distance had always stolen: the intimacy of voice. Now your parent or your friend or your lover could be a thousand miles away yet softly in your ear. Such was the promise made to America by A.T. & T., a.k.a Ma Bell, the behemoth that, from the turn of the twentieth century to the nineteen-eighties, ran most of the phone industry. Telephones, it declared, were a milestone for us all. One of the company’s advertisements, from 1909, called them tools of “civilization . . . one of the most powerful influences for broadening human intelligence.” By the time of my own childhood, in Britain, a century later, the upbeat mantras hadn’t changed. Nokia: “Connecting People.” T-Mobile: “Life’s for Sharing.” We surely want connection, and we surely want to share. In “The Telephone: A New History” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), James Gleick begins in agreement, describing his subject as “an ordinary necessity” that has been “essential in the development of modern life.” It would be churlish to say that he’s wrong, or that the big carriers didn’t deliver on part of what they sold. Today, I live in London, a city where I have no family, but, at the touch of a screen, I can talk to loved ones far and wide.
Yet that partial intimacy can be unsettling. The telephone seems to abolish distance, but the voice remains fundamentally physical, air percussed by flesh. The telephone is a conjurer: hearing someone speak, we imagine that person with us in the room. Deprived of body language, unable to gauge the person’s tone against the way they touch their cheek or tilt their head, we invent what we cannot see, and may find ourselves wondering how much of our interlocutor is our own creation. The connection itself isn’t entirely under our control. The system we have to use, those wires pulsing with current—or, today, the cell towers humming with signals—belongs to other parties, faceless corporations, themselves possibly under bigger thumbs. It can be hard to forget that, when we route our words through those matrices, there may be someone else listening: since their inception, the wires have been tapped by operators, by eavesdroppers, by what Gleick calls a range of “invisible interlopers.” So we talk blindly into the receiver, and we’re never quite sure of where or how our words will land. “Sorry, Wrong Number” shows the telephone in one of its less examined aspects, as a paranoia machine; but then, as Mrs. Stevenson learned too late, some paranoias are justified.
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