At an airport recently I saw a sign for the public telephones; it was a symbol showing a round telephone dial with a receiver across the top. Nothing odd about this, you may think — that is if, like me, you are over 40. If you are under 20, on the other hand, it may be incomprehensible, for at no time in your life has your telephone looked even remotely like this. At the very least, the symbol must seem absurdly anachronistic, like those twee signs you get on loo doors where the man and woman are wearing Edwardian costume.
The change is not confined to the phone’s shape, either. The whole meaning of the word ‘phone’ is different among the under 20s, as shown by a friend’s teenage daughter when petitioning her parents to buy her some gadget for Christmas.
‘Look, Dad,’ she explained, ‘it’s only about £100 and it’s like a phone. You can update your Facebook, you can message your friends, listen to music, play games and watch films.’
‘Can you make phone calls on it?’
‘No, but it’s basically like a phone.’
I am fairly sympathetic to this new culture. Generally I prefer people to email me or send a text than to ring me up. By demanding immediate attention, a phone call is intrusive in a way nothing else is. Marcel Proust felt the same way. A friend of his tried to persuade him to install a telephone in his cork-lined room, explaining ‘It’s wonderful — look, the bell just rings, and you answer it.’ ‘I see,’ replied Proust, ‘so I am the machine’s domestic servant.’
If Proust found it demeaning to answer a phone, at least he never had to deal with call centres.
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