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Why Telephone Companies Once Discouraged People From Chatting
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Why Telephone Companies Once Discouraged People From Chatting

Today phones have grown critical for making personal connections. The first
phone companies probably wouldn’t have been thrilled.

  by [79]Jessica Leigh Hester April 9, 2020

  Why Telephone Companies Once Discouraged People From Chatting
  Copy Link [80]Facebook [81]Twitter [82]Reddit [83]Flipboard [84]Pocket
  During the flu outbreak of 1918, phone operators took precautions—and
  many companies asked people to stay off the line.
  During the flu outbreak of 1918, phone operators took precautions—and
  many companies asked people to stay off the line. [85]Bettmann /
  Contributor / Getty Images
  Wonder From Home
  See More

  As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep across the world, putting
  billions in isolation, many people are scrambling to stay tethered to
  friends, family, and coworkers. More than 80 percent of people surveyed
  in the United States and United Kingdom report spending more time
  squinting at their phones and other screens, [86]according to data
  published by the World Economic Forum. Those little screens have come
  to feel like a lifeline, offering a sense of community and a sliver of
  normalcy.

  That’s not exactly new. Decades ago, Bell and AT&T ran ads exhorting
  people to “reach out and touch someone.” The ads promised that phone
  calls could collapse the [87]physical and emotional distance between
  people. In [88]one commercial from the late 1980s, a kid phoning his
  parents from college was able to picture his family’s routine—sister
  primping for a date, brother rushing in from soccer practice, dad
  rifling through the refrigerator just a few hours after dinner.

  But, of course, it wasn’t always this way. The last time a pandemic of
  comparable scale stampeded around the world, in 1918, only around a
  third of American households had phones, [89]The New York Times
  recently reported—and, obviously, those devices were much lower-fi. For
  decades, people with phones had been largely discouraged from using
  them for gabbing, ostensibly because some towns only had a few lines to
  serve everyone. Then, when the flu began to devastate communities, some
  phone companies begged people to keep their calls to a minimum,
  [90]Fast Company reported. In October 1918, for instance, the Michigan
  State Telephone Company took out an ad in a Battle Creek newspaper,
  asking locals to “please restrict your use of the telephone to calls
  which are absolutely essential,” thus freeing up operators to attend to
  “the essential business of the community.” Similar messages went out in
  New Jersey and North Carolina, where an ad asked the public to “refrain
  from using the telephone except when necessary so that prompt service
  can be given to the sick.”
  There were some exceptions to the "don't hog the lines with chit-chat"
  idea. This ad ran in the <em> St. Louis Post-Dispatch</em> in 1910.
  There were some exceptions to the “don’t hog the lines with chit-chat”
  idea. This ad ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1910. Public Domain

  “The sociability function seems so obviously important today, and yet
  was ignored or resisted by the industry for almost the first half of
  its history,” writes Claude S. Fischer, a sociologist at the University
  of California, Berkeley, in a 1988 article in the journal
  [91]Technology and Culture.

  Atlas Obscura exchanged emails with Fischer, also author of[92] America
  Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, about how phones
  have helped people connect—sometimes, to the frustration of the phone
  companies.

When the telephone first emerged as a consumer product, how was it marketed,
and who was encouraged to buy it?

  It was originally marketed to businesses as a business device—a
  much-improved telegraph. When the Bell company started marketing to
  households, it focused for 30-plus years on practical household
  management: Get the phone for your wife so that she can call the
  doctor, the grocer, the police, and you can call her when you’re coming
  home with company. That sort of thing.
  This ad, published in the <em>Allentown Democrat</em> in September
  1913, illustrates how the telephone was thought of as a business tool.
  This ad, published in the Allentown Democrat in September 1913,
  illustrates how the telephone was thought of as a business tool.
  [93]Atwngirl/Public Domain

How did that work out?

  Household users did use it for these purposes, but almost from the
  start customers—notably women—used it for social purposes: To check in
  with others, to arrange social dates, and, frankly, to gossip. This was
  even clearer in rural areas, where the phones were a major social
  lifeline. The telephone industry for decades saw this as a misuse of
  the telephone, and even tried to suppress it.

What changed?

  The shift was not the personal staying-connected use of the telephone,
  but the industry coming around to see these social uses as not a bug,
  but a feature. In the 1920s, the Bell companies switched from trying to
  repress chit-chat on the phones to marketing the phones as a great way
  to stay in touch with family and friends.

Now that we have so many other ways of staying in touch, what role does the
phone play in times of crisis?

  I see voice-to-voice communication today as part of a package of
  diverse and more flexible one-to-one communications, including email,
  texting, and the like. So people may, for example, text a few times a
  day, and arrange for a phone call on top. There is some evidence to
  suggest that the voice-to-voice remains the most intimate part of the
  communications package.

  This interview has been edited and condensed.
  Next in series

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