Phone box a direct line to simpler time
THE West Cork village of Castletownshend, my father’s home place, still has a public phone box.
In keeping with the style of the village, it is a painted yellow and green P&T one, with the word TELEFÓN in cló gaelach illuminated at the top. More pleasing to the eye than the more recent aluminium and Perspex type, it still has almost all of the 18 small squares of glass on each its sides.
Emblematic of a prioritisation of the aesthetic, local people and one man in particular have had to do battle to retain it, making it more a community phone box than a public one. But it is what lies within that is even more remarkable — a functioning public phone that gladly accepts coins in exchange for telecommunication.
No phone cards or credit cards are required. Many may regard this phone box as a reliquary containing the preserved remains of a redundant tool, bypassed by the march of progress and the development of the mobile phone.
Alternatively, Castletownshend, a sleepy village that sleep-talks about colonial repression and resistance, can be viewed as talking back to ideas about the inevitability of certain forms of change producing and produced by new technologies.
The ubiquitous and increasingly versatile mobile phone constitutes one of those doubled-edged technologies that can be both a help and a hindrance. I am not suggesting that it is a Victor Frankenstein-type creation; its benefits are widely known and publicised, not least by those who successfully manufacture the mobile phones and the need for one.
But it has monstrous potentials as a surveillance device and one that can enslave people to the demands of “24-7” wage labour. Unquestionably, it is privatising and individualising the phone, and is an exemplar of compulsory consumption.
Each of us, adults and children, are compelled to own one by the new conventions of communication, institutionalised in the increasing inclusion of mobile phone numbers as “required information” on official forms.
The slow death of the public phone is part of a broader death of the public, of public services, and public-mindedness. In the early 1990s, there were more than 8,500 public phones in the Republic but in 2009 Eircom, the privatised descendant of the state-owned company Telecom Éireann, began reducing the remaining 4,850 public phones by more than 2,000.
Similar to the erosion of the lamentably few universal entitlements of the welfare state and other forms of collective ownership, responsibility and care, each of us is now expected to provide for ourselves.
This is irrespective of the “failed consumers” who cannot afford a mobile phone or who choose to do without one, and that there are times when mobile phones fail their private owners due to lack of power, credit, or — in the case of Castletownshend — coverage.
In this regard, the mobile phone can be regarded as a technology “hurtful to commonality”, the type of technology opposed during the Luddite revolts in Britain, whose bicentenary is now being celebrated.
Widely misunderstood and misrepresented as backward reactionaries opposed to technological progress, between Nov 1811 and Jan 1813, the artisan textile workers known as Luddites systematically smashed and destroyed industrial technologies that they regarded as socially harmful.
Despite having unlikely supporters, such as the poet Byron, who devoted one of his rare appearances in the House of Lords to a speech in their favour, the revolts were brutally suppressed by the hanging of 14 key Luddites. Sceptics of the dogma that new technologies automatically produce progress, we could learn a lot from them today.
AMONG the questions that the Luddites 200 Organising Forum, the organisers of the Luddite bicentenary celebrations, is encouraging us to ask about 21st century technologies are: What kind of a world is implied by the new technology? What alternatives are ruled out? Does it speed up or slow down the pace of life? Does it concentrate or democratise power? Does it contribute to the commodification of more aspects of life? Does it encourage uniformity or diversity? Does it atomise society or encourage community? Who is in charge, the person or the technology?
In Castletownshend, they don’t smash mobile phones, but they do resist their monopolising tendency whereby other kinds of phones are eliminated. And the retention in the village of the public phone shows a commitment to a technology that is “helpful to commonality”, the kind championed by the Luddites.
* Órla O’Donovan works at the school of applied social studies at University College Cork
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