Entries in Privacy (1)
Hanging Up
The Washington Post recently ran an interesting story about the last operational telephone booth in the greater DC region. The story detailed the reasons behind the decline of the phone booth in our society, which can be neatly summed up as: the rise of the inexpensive mobile phone.
What interested me about this were the shifting cultural norms implicit in the end of the phone booth. We’ve written a lot about the Internet and its role in the erosion of both privacy and the expectation of privacy. But the rise of the mobile phone actually may be another prime mover. Looking at a picture of the phone booth, I am struck by one thing: telephone conversations were once considered private. Callers wanted to discuss their business free from eavesdroppers, and everyone else wanted to avoid the inanity we are now inundated with daily due to mobile phones. (Is there any worse sentence in the English language than, “Hello, we’ve just landed”?)
For all the talk of the Internet eroding privacy, we are more complicit than we like to believe: by embracing convenience and mobility (“Mom, you used to talk on the phone standing still?”) our mobile phone society has set privacy aside. Plus, we’ve made things more difficult for Superman.
Image: Lee McCain (Flickr)
Christopher Kent
And that is that.
Christopher Kent
in Technology, Values and Attitudes, Privacy
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