Is anybody really listening?

Our modern society has developed a love-hate relationship with communications technology. We love the convenience and gratification of instant communications – cell phones, pagers, email, push-to-talk, text messaging, instant messaging, chat rooms, forums, blogs, 120 channels of TV – the list goes on and on.

However, we have come to depend on this technology so much that when it doesn’t work perfectly, we get annoyed, frustrated, and angry. Still we keep on using our favorite gadgets, buying more of them, upgrading them to get the latest and greatest new features, and committing more of our time, money, and life to them, believing that they’ll make our life fuller, easier and better.

Party Lines and Listening in on the Neighbors

It seems remarkable to think back to my childhood when our family had ONE telephone – an ugly green one that was owned by the local telephone company, who had firmly attached it to the kitchen wall – and our phone was on an EIGHT-household party line. Yes, young folks, there was a time in the not-so-distant past when cell phones, pagers, satellite dishes, Tivos, iPods, and the Internet DID NOT EXIST ! (NOTE: Yes, we DID have indoor plumbing, although there were two outhouses back on my grandparents’ farm that were available if we needed to use them.)

We not only had to share the ONE family telephone with everyone else in our household, we also had to share it with a number of other families in the neighborhood as well, and they could pick up the phone and listen in on your conversations anytime – oh, the horror!

I can remember that using the telephone to make a call was something of an event. Proper party-line phone etiquette dictated that you would pick up the phone, listen to see if anyone else was on the line, then dial the five-digit local number you wanted to call. (Call long-distance? Only in an emergency!)

If the party line were in use, you’d check back again a few minutes later to see if it was available. If you waited still longer and tried a third time and the neighbors were STILL on the phone, you might interrupt your neighbor and ask them to conclude their conversation so you could make a call. Usually, this involved some throat-clearing and an “Excuse me, but I need to make an IMPORTANT call.”  Since we had to see these folks at church, the store, or on walks around the neighborhood, we considered it more important to maintain good relations with them than to get into a verbal spat over their use of the party line (unless they got obnoxious about it).

But even our patience and willingness to practice proper phone etiquette had its limits: when one neighbor was elected township supervisor and another one became the dog-catcher, my Mom called the phone company to complain about the constantly busy party line.  She was rewarded by getting us switched to a FOUR-party line – what a triumph! By the time I became a teenager, we had