Landline Telephone

Definition

A landline telephone is a telephone connected to the public switched telephone network by a physical wire running to a fixed location. The defining property, and the one that matters anthropologically, is in the name: the line belongs to the place, not to the person.

History

Alexander Graham Bell was granted US Patent 174,465 for the telephone on 7 March 1876, days ahead of a competing filing by Elisha Gray, in a dispute that has never entirely settled. Early service required a direct wire between each pair of subscribers, which is combinatorially impossible at scale; the telephone exchange, with human operators connecting calls by hand, solved this and made the network the network.

The second transformation was automation. Almon Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker, patented an automatic step-by-step switch in 1891 — reportedly because he believed a local operator was diverting calls to a competitor — and the direct-dial exchange it enabled removed the operator from the ordinary call. Subsequent developments were largely refinements of scale and speed: crossbar switching, direct distance dialling, electronic and then digital exchanges, and the SS7 signalling system.

The Social Form of a Fixed Line

Because a landline addresses a place, it produced a set of social arrangements that vanished with it:

• The household as the unit of contact. Calling a person meant calling their home, and whoever answered was a gatekeeper. Teenagers negotiating privacy with parents, and callers exchanging pleasantries with whoever picked up, were structural features of the technology.
• The shared instrument. One phone, in a hallway, with a cord of fixed length that determined how private a conversation could be. The length of that cord was a real constraint on family life.
• Unreachability as the default. Leaving the house meant being uncontactable, and this required no decision, no explanation and no apology.
• Memorised numbers. Before stored contact lists, people knew dozens of numbers by heart — a cognitive load that the mobile removed and that few people miss, but whose removal made the numbers themselves inaccessible when a device is lost.
• The phone book. A public directory of everyone's name, address and number, delivered free to every household. That this was uncontroversial for a century is a useful corrective to assumptions about the stability of privacy norms.

Decline

Fixed-line subscriptions have fallen steadily since the early 2000s across most high-income countries, displaced by mobile telephony and voice over IP, with a majority of households in many countries now mobile-only. What survives of the copper network survives largely for other reasons — alarm systems, lifts, rural coverage, and emergency service location, since a fixed line reports its own address in a way a mobile does not.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The landline is the clearest available baseline for measuring what mobile telephony changed. Nearly every observation in the mobile communication literature — the collapse of unreachability, the shift from place-addressing to person-addressing, the loss of the household gatekeeper — is a comparison against this technology, whether or not it is stated.

Related Reading

• Mobile technologies
• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement
• Hand Me Up Technology

External Links

• http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventors/a/telephone.htm