Until recently, I prided myself on never having downloaded an App to my mobile phone. I began to understand how King Canute must have felt when Apps started downloading automatically – I must have pressed the wrong button, or given my permission, but it didn’t seem like I had… Perhaps it was inevitable? A natural process that all good capitalists call progress?
My late uncle refused to buy a television. One of my cousins would regularly cycle several miles to our house to watch Friday night horror films and nearly frighten himself to death cycling back home afterwards, down unlit country lanes. When he did eventually concede to buy one, my uncle’s television was black and white – by then everyone else already had colour. Sometimes it’s cool to be out of date: my uncle was simply stubborn.
But he opened my mind to another type of AP – the Aged Parent. I’ve noticed that APs seem to be making a bit of a comeback of late, especially in the world of mobile communications. Prive have linked up with Stuart Hughes to produce a limited edition of 10 gold plated brick phones, priced at £139,995 each. And there’s even a digital brick case for the iPhone.
Despite our new fangled technology, we still seem to hanker after retro styling and artefacts we can relate to in a curiously human sort of way. Perhaps this will change. Or perhaps we will?
Good god that elfoid phone is pretty freaky!! I’m always having to buy ‘old fashioned’ mobiles for my father as he demands to have big buttons and no gadgets, he just had one of those old people phones from Doro, even though he’s not even very old
As regards that “Elfoid robotic cellphone” I don’t see much of a difference between it, and that portable, palm-sized fertility symbol Venus of Villendorf. Both were/are meant to be tools for wirelessly magick communication with absent entities – and the question whether the more analog of the two wasn’t more effective at what it was used for can not be conclusively answered.
I was going to ask if anyone had bought one of those rather patronising old people’s phones, which are designed for people who think text messages are destroying the English language and who can still memorise phone numbers.
Design-wise, how about this Eiffel Tower 1892 Reproductionjob?
0191 664394………….1979
832384………………….1958, pre STD.
Texting is the spawn of the devil, the abyss, Armageddon, why not just talk, for goodness sake.
Ah so you got one then, Malty.
I’m so used to text and email, which you can answer on your own terms, that I now find people phoning me quite rude; bloody cheek expecting me to drop whatever I’m doing and pay attention to them RIGHT NOW.
Losing, or already gone ability to memorize phone numbers is actually an admission of individual evolutionary regression, not evidence of with-it progress. Ya going back all the way home to slimy creepy-crawlies that once were your forefathers, baby.
That said, there is a vast semiotic difference between, say, your Eiffel Tower 1892 Reproduction Decorator Phony and what to this lit.critic looks like the ULTIMATE stationary iPhone encasement—the way telephones were meant by their once-inventor Vsievalod Trofimovich Telefonov to be used—that every stately home should aspire to be having.
Indeed Ianf.
Nb. Our spam filter holds comments with more than 2 links in quarantine for approval, which is why a couple of yours have taken a while to appear.
ianf – thanks for sharing the curiously contrived looking iPhone ‘encasement’ that every stately home should aspire to – love the oxymoron. And semiotics? A dial means a dial – no?
Susan, semiotics were the bait to be swallowed hook, line and sinker (strangely enough the last three are still in use in analog telephonics). To you a dial may be just a dial, but I know of at least two verified cases of “ceci n’est pas un dial” dial-selfdenial.
As regards Dave Lull’s erudaddition of an apparatus allegedly named after Evelyn Waugh and heralded by Claud Cockburn, I would have expected such ear-trumpet to be made at least out of pewter, if not nickel silver, definitely not this pedestrian-grade copper plate it has been cobbled together from. That said, the televolution isn’t standing still, and I am happy to report that the same noble all-analog acoustical sound amplification principles behind above unwieldy metal apparatus(es) can now be achieved with soft, bendy, definitely portable silicone. No, not of the breast implant variety – although the scriptwriting mind boggles at blockbuster possibilities of a leading lady being implanted with sound-sensitive kind… where was I? A bit firmer form of molded ditto, enough to double as a portrait/ landscape desktop stand for an iPhone. Yes, Madam, you read that right… and, thanks to unbridled globalized they-eat-dogs-don’t-they competition, now available in all sorts of ungodly colors, and warranting a price of no more than a fiver including postage from Hong Kong to UK/EU.
Love it Susan, we custodians of the inheritance salute you, keep ’em coming, the gadgets aimed at the collectors of Gordon’s winter fuel allowance, incontinence thongs, five inch slippers, spandex cardigans, take them all up, we will.
Thing is though but, many wrinklies such as I were there at the birth of the cellphone revolution and have grown tired of it all, many of us reverting to message sticks, smoke signals and carrier pigeons. or simply shouting.
We draw a line in the sand over facebonking and tweeterising, even saying the names makes us oldies fall about laughing.
The Elfoid Portable Telepresence Robot would make an ideal anti-hacking gadget, celebs take note.
Early 1987, Mobira Cityman, £850 each, both in-car fixed handset and contractors brick, battery life…450 nanoseconds, weight…30 kilos, range…just about reach blighty…from the Calais docks, tended to catch fire and burn down the house / motor, the yuppies turned green with envy when pulled out on a train.
Think I will stick to the £40 jobbie for just now, doesn’t need an app and is used every blue moon.
Talking of buttons, Worm, I always found rotary dialling to be strangely satisfying, though the mobile market doesn’t seem to have taken that into account…
Curiously naff designs, Brit – cheers! And malty, malty… malty… I feel you’re telepresent – your singularly unique ‘voice’ always comes through loud and clear! What was that old BT strapline – it pays to talk? Probably why all those horribly intrusive instant messaging systems do so well. Whatever happened to handwritten notes, scented love letters and lingering conversations, savouring the modulations of a beautiful voice?
I’d like a traditional dial phone, but more for the looks and the sound. Imagine how long a modern number might take with a rotating dial: might as well go back to flint axes and knives.
Nostalgia is becoming strange and detached, though, isn’t it? Look at the link between years and ages: I turned 20 in the late ’80s. Anyone retiring at that time had been born before the Wall Street Crash and probably fought in the War. There were people alive then who’d been in the Cotton Club on Duke Ellington’s first night. Someone retiring at 65 now was in their teens when the Beatles stormed the States: too late, really, to have spent much time living in any sort of Agatha Christie England.
In other words, nostalgia is being expressed by people for something they never knew: and in the case of the telephone, it’s older than all of us. None of us remember a real epistolary culture: a few of us have known letter writers, but the rest was all postcards and Christmas. Robin Hanson (here), talking about fantasy novels, said
I love that “especially functional, moral, good to people like us. Nail on the head, there.
In some cases I wish we could go back, James… like having another person (preferably local) on the end of the line, instead of a call centre queuing system.
And I know I’m a sentimental old bird, but in a way nostalgia is passed on from previous generations. I still remember my grandmother (born in 1895) who saw Queen Victoria’s funeral cortege as a child – her life was more simple and innocent – yet she lived through two World Wars – and she had a rotating dial! And visiting parents’ friends and relatives houses as a child – some were olde world and full of curious knick-knacks and weird musty smells, whilst others were full on vintage Ibiza tat and teal blue telephones (all worth a fortune nowadays of course).
I probably shouldn’t mention a long distance relationship, conducted for at least two years, mainly by letter…
I think in the end the way to do it is to have two phones – one big bakelite number to receive calls on, and, in a drawer, a push-button job to actually make them… the telephonic equivalent of that moment when you realise that you can hide your laptop in the drawer of your rolltop desk!
I do tend to be a little suspicious of the “simpler, more innocent times” idea because it is referenced so often in Victorian literature. Three Men In A Boat gets underway when our narrator decides he must take a break from the speed and hurly-burly of the nineteenth century… I’ve a hunch that people are just wired to assume that the past was, as my early quotation said, kinder to people like themselves. If so, then the thought comes to all of us from time to time.
Class comes into it at some point. My great aunt was born in 1897, daughter of a violent drunk who’d been a constable in the Met chasing Jack the Ripper. She left school, against her will, at 12, and spent the rest of her adult life working in a sewing factory, which she hated.
She thought the 1970s just paradise, and we children the luckiest in the world. But THAT title, I now know, must go to my father’s type and generation: well-off and middle class in the pre-1973 boom. Fettes, Cambridge, the nascent computer industry, subsidized mortgage etc. etc. And what else? Never having known war. Never having seen loved ones carried off by preventable disease. Never been hungry or helplessly unemployed. Never been cold, school apart.
The downside? What downside? All that was, as Worm says, on television. And if all you watch on television is golf…
Back in James aunt’s (early) seventies paradiso I did consider that I had arrived, Lawrence Pilkington, eat your heart out, there was I, a simple Geordie, sitting in a plush orifice in Hertfordshire (Habitatish) with two, I say two, trimphones on me desk, try and dial a number, off the desk they skittered. Added to which the ginger whinger, Clive Sinclair had given me an embryo cal-cu-lator, Cossor had lent me a prototype fax machine, Porton Down had given me some yellow papers to sign and I had, unasked, bought a computer, an Olivetti, a glorified Hollerith, payroll cruncher. From those dizzying heights via Pro Engineer, Maya, Unix, Sun Sparc and the pill I am the shambling wreck you see before you today, I have indeed become Scalably Processed Architecture.
The moral of this story? ignore the technology, concentrate on the music.
When I was at boarding school until the early 90’s we had no phones or TV and still had to write a letter home every sunday morning that was then checked for handwriting and content before sending!
Video calls seemed very cool in 70’s tv but there was something reassuring about just a voice in your ear when i was a teenager, especially if the voice was friendly & female (and the call was local, thereby avoiding a fatherly inquisition). Blokes have very functional phone calls. Being able to see who was calling before you answered changed the whole game.
I was involved in a video conference call the other day, using Skype and my laptop at home. No big deal nowadays, of course, and actually FREE. I’m not sure I would have believed it as a young ‘un if someone had told me the video calls that you saw on Star Trek would turn out like that for us (or, for that matter, even just a few years ago). It seems to have crept up on us too – I don’t recall a big hoo ha about it all.
Mind you, I’m looking forward to phones that float beside us – I’m sick of having to hold these things to my ear.
I’d patent that idea now if I were you. And then get busy on the versions that (a) hold your pictures up next to the wall without nails or blu-tack (b) control overhead cameras at the Olympics (now THAT’LL show the Chinese) and (c) keep the Sunday roast out of reach of the cat.
Here’s the latest among hot audio apps for us APs (I hear there’s one named after Evelyn Waugh that’s bigger and more effective for some of our purposes*):
http://www.runstopsound.com/data/image/05-02.jpg
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* http://www.counterpunch.org/claud04262003.html