Read My Lips - the blog

Phone Tag & Other Annoyances

Only Disconnect

By ROB WALKER
Published: December 26, 2004 in The New York Times Magazine [likely requires registration]

The Electronic Secretary: Joseph J. Zimmermann Jr., b. 1912

Joseph Zimmermann Jr., who died this year at 92, invented something called The Electronic Secretary. The concept behind this clunky device was simple enough: if someone called you on the telephone and you weren't there to answer, the caller could leave a recorded message. It wasn't the first answering machine, but it has been credited as the first to catch on commercially in the 50's. It was therefore an important development in the technology of connectedness, the power of being always in touch, which is something that gets a lot of attention. But Zimmermann's invention was also a key marker in a less celebrated history -- the history of what could be called the technology of avoidance. Getting a message from someone you want to talk to is convenient and nice, but letting a machine take a call from someone you don't want to talk to is sublime.

"There's always been a battle between access and control," notes James E. Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University and the author of "Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life." Long before the Electronic Secretary, there were people well off enough to have teams of minions to help them get in touch with whomever they wanted to reach and to filter who could reach them. Even so, adding technology to the screening process was controversial at first. "Huge numbers of people objected to these machines," Katz says. Outgoing messages back then were verbose and apologetic; even when Katz worked for a spinoff of Bell Labs in the 80's, he was told that using an answering machine was "inhuman." Not until 1987 did a majority of Americans polled say it was no longer rude to use such a device.

Today, of course, things are different, as the answering machine has given way to nearly ubiquitous voice-mail systems and "interactive voice-response units" (the touch-tone-driven systems that answer calls at a vast majority of American corporations). In fact, it's now considered rude not to have some sort of machine to take messages for you. And not only have we become used to machines that take messages, we also sometimes prefer them to live communication (thus the modern practice of delivering unpleasant news when you know the recipient is away from the phone).

Between cellphones, e-mail and instant messaging, it's now considered exotic to be truly unreachable at all. Yet for every advance made in the name of connection, there is an avoidance counterstrike. Services pop up that allow us to locate our friends while out on the town (like Dodgeball.com), and services pop up that help us pretend to be one place when we're really somewhere else (like the online "Alibi and Excuse Club"). Maybe just as crucial to the cellphone as its built-in voice mail is its off switch -- something early phone users never wanted. To get a sense of where the battle between access and control stands today, just ask yourself what happens when you're talking to a friend in person and your cellphone rings. Do you ignore it? Do you check to see who is trying to reach you (relying, of course, on the requisite Caller ID feature)? Do you take the call? Are you happy to be in touch or exasperated to be bothered? The answers depend on a morass of status judgments and social-protocol evaluations, all made in an instant.

In his research, Katz has found, not surprisingly, that teenagers and young adults are far more preoccupied with connectedness than anyone else. "They want to hear from everybody as much as possible," he says. Partly this is about a technological comfort level, but it's also about life-stage issues -- the young person still developing his identity is very keyed in to social networks; later, time management becomes more important, and connections are more likely to be seen as interruptions. Nevertheless, all of us seem to some extent to be responsive to the summons from afar, even though that summons often turns out to be a friend using up his cellphone minutes (and your precious time) while in line at the grocery store. If the steady advance of communication technology since the Electronic Secretary has taught us anything, it's that there is something addictive about being in touch -- as much as we might sometimes wish we could kick the habit. As Katz summarizes, "There is no going back."