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GUEST OBSERVER
Smartphones and the internet have revolutionised society, commerce, and politics, reshaping how we work and play, and how our brains are wired. They have even revolutionised how revolutions are made.
For enthusiasts, these technologies enhance freedom and democratise the flow of information, putting more power in the hands of people to generate political change. In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, high school students have used social media to provoke a public debate about guns in the United States. However, detractors counter that social media and the internet foster “slactivism”: weak, low-effort commitments that do little more than make users feel better.
It’s difficult to evaluate today’s communication technologies unless we understand how people communicated in the past. My own research looks back at how political activists used the phone in the years before the mobile phone revolution, using the records of activist groups and interviews to find out how phone talk shaped what they did and how well they did it.
The results higlight how important phone calls were in fostering a sense of community, intimacy and connection. This suggests that we have lost as much as we have gained with our high-tech gizmos.
The landline’s role in political protest
Before Facebook, the internet and mobile phones, political movements used traditional technologies to recruit like-minded people, raise money, organise events and advocate for change.
Activist groups called people on the phone, as well as printing, mailing and – by the late 1980s – faxing information. In the second half of the 20th century, the phone was essential to political activism, and it helped to create lasting movements in which people felt emotionally bonded.
The phone was crucial for sharing information quickly. In the US in the 1950s and 1960s, when most Americans had telephones, the civil rights movement relied heavily on the telephone. Thousands of participants in the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s, for example, found ride shares by using phone trees.
Phone trees, still in use today, are based on lists of people who call other people: ten people each call ten people, who then each call ten people. Before email, the phone tree was one of the quickest and most efficient ways to disseminate information. A well-organised tree could quickly trigger thousands of phone calls to elected officials or turn thousands of people out for demonstrations.
In 1961, Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) lines were introduced, allowing unlimited long-distance calls for a fixed fee. They saved the lives of some activists by giving grassroots workers who could not afford expensive long-distance calls a way to call headquarters to report dangerous situations.
By the 1980s, 1-800 calling cards had become common. Activists could call anyone from any phone while leaving the charges to be paid by headquarters. The number of calls made by activist groups exploded.
As new movements for environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, feminism, Chicano rights, Native American rights, gay rights, and conservative causes such as school prayer gathered steam in the 1970s and 1980s, the landline phone remained central.
The power of the human voice
In 1986 Americans placed 1.97 billion calls a day – eight calls for every woman, man and child. They were having about seven times as many telephone conversations as they had had in 1950, and the number was still rising. One human rights staffer told me of his work in the mid-1980s: "All the work was done by phone. If I wasn’t in a meeting, I was on the phone."
Those calls were about much more than sharing information. Calling on a landline phone was a labour-intensive form of communication, but it provided immediate personal contact, an opportunity for genuine exchange, and an emotional depth that written communication lacked.
Calls were able to knit far-flung people into deeply felt communities because the phone transmits the capacities of the human voice.
The voice is one of our most powerful instruments, designed not only to communicate but also to build intimacy. Our voices convey emotion so effectively that we can identify emotions in speech even when the words themselves are muffled by walls. The voice indicates whether you are sincere – or whether you are drunk.
The powers of the human voice help to explain why talking on the phone can foster feelings of connection. Research on the telephone in the 1980s showed that a call made people feel wanted, needed, included, and involved.
This is why a recent Harvard Business Review study found that face-to-face requests were 34 times more successful than emails.
Better technology doesn’t equal better communication
Critics of digital media say that it corrodes human relationships. The generation that has grown up on smart phones, which have become devices for avoiding talk, lack empathy and struggle to form friendships based on trust, according to one study.
In online communities, people tend toward narcissism and often dramatically fail to care about the feelings of others. Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian whose anonymous Facebook page in 2011 helped topple a dictatorship, concluded that social media facilitated “the spread of misinformation, rumours, echo chambers, and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic.” Empathy vanished, he says.
Landline calls helped to instil positive emotions: feelings of connection, pride, gratitude, a sense of elevation and happiness.
Psychologists tell us that whether we are extroverts or introverts, we need human contact and feel more alive after connecting with other people. Phone calls created those connections. They made people more optimistic and resilient and broadened their mindsets. For activists, talking revealed connections they would otherwise have missed, and deepened their personal commitment to the cause and to one another.
The landline phone, of course, was not a flawless medium – static, missed calls, busy signals, dropped connections, prank calls and phone threats guaranteed frustration. You can bond over the phone, but you can also argue.
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92662/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">But the rise of smart phones – which Americans check 8 billion times a day – has not meant that we communicate better. More communication can mean that we hear each other less. Among American millennials, the number of voice calls they make is falling as texting soars. And that means we may be losing a powerful part of what connects us to each other.
Barbara Keys, Associate Professor of US and International History, University of Melbourne
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-landline-phones-made-us-happy-and-connected-92662" target="_blank">original article</a>.
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j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

How landline phones made us happy and connected: Barbara Keys

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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/68931/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">
GUEST OBSERVER
We’ve all seen it in the movies: overgrown “kidults” living at home while their parents pick up their dirty laundry, cook their meals and vacuum around their unmade bed. 
This narrow portrayal of what modern-day multigenerational households look like is also found in newspapers worldwide. Names like “mummy’s boys”, “gen why bother moving out”, “kippers” and “gestaters” are used to describe this supposedly dependent generation who won’t leave the comfort of the family home.
Since we began our research four years ago, however, we have found that different generations of the same family live together in one household for a whole range of reasons. This results in a great diversity of outcomes. 
These stories of different drivers and outcomes, along with findings from several related Australian studies, are retold in our new book, Multigenerational Family Living. 
In the book, we debunk a series of myths about multigenerational households. With around one in five Australians living in multigenerational households since at least the mid-1980s, it’s about time we moved beyond the stereotypes.
<h2>Myth #1: Kids won’t become ‘independent’</h2>
If one only paid attention to media reports, it’d be easy to think that multigenerational households in modern-day Australia come about solely because young adults won’t fly the nest. While there is some truth in this, there are other reasons, and combinations of reasons, that lead multiple generations of adult family members to live together. 
Among the 392 respondents to our survey, “adult children yet to leave home” was only the third-most-common driver. Finance was the most common.
Finance, however, can encompass many things.
<a href="/images/2016/11/29/image-20161121-4544-4ut9vm.PNG" target="_blank">Click to enlarge</a>
<img src="/images/2016/11/29/image-20161121-4544-4ut9vm.PNG" alt="">
Survey results, Author provided 
Financial constraints can come about for a wide range of structural reasons. These include an increase in attainment of tertiary (and even postgraduate) qualifications, workforce casualisation and the unaffordability of housing, whether buying or renting. 
These constraints often encourage the younger generation to delay leaving the parental home. However, we also found examples of adult children paying their parents’ mortgages and buying homes together to manage housing costs within the family.
Changes in government policies and priorities can also have impacts on people’s decisions about their living arrangement. The withdrawal of government support – such as changes in the Australian child, aged and disability care sectors – increases the pressures on family members to take care of each other. 
There have been reports of grandparents moving across town to be closer (or to live with) their grandchildren so they can provide child care during the day. 
Likewise, some of our participants said they invited their elderly parents to live with them so they could take care of them because professional aged care facilities were unaffordable or undesirable. “Care arrangement support” was the second-most-common driver for multigenerational living.
<h2>Myth #2: It’s something migrants do</h2>
There is a lot of literature about how common multigenerational living is elsewhere, whether in Asia, the Middle East, or Southern Europe. 
While more than one in three (34.9%) Australian residents born in North Africa and the Middle East lived in multigenerational households in 2011, only one in six (15.7%) born in Northwest Europe (e.g. the UK) did so.
<a href="/images/2016/11/29/image-20161121-4544-1nlzr3p.png" target="_blank">Click to enlarge</a>
<h2><img src="/images/2016/11/29/image-20161121-4544-1nlzr3p.png" alt=""></h2>
Custom 2011 Census data. Image: Alec Gelota, Author provided 
Certainly, there is a cultural element to living arrangement decisions. Yet our analysis shows that three-quarters of people who lived in multigenerational households in Australia in 2011 were born here or elsewhere in Oceania.
<h2>Myth #3: Live-at-home kidults take advantage of parents</h2>
One of the bigger gripes about multigenerational living is that not everyone pitches in. 
Lyn Craig and Abigail Powell found that while adult children do pitch in and help out with chores, these efforts don’t really help their parents all that much, particularly their mothers. 
The reasons are a mix of adult children doing chores for themselves (such as doing their own laundry or cooking their own meals), instead of communal sharing, and of culturally imbued ideas about who should be responsible for groceries, cooking and gardening.
<a href="/images/2016/11/29/image-20161121-4528-2tl4jn.PNG" target="_blank">Click to enlarge</a>
<h2><img src="/images/2016/11/29/image-20161121-4528-2tl4jn.PNG" alt=""></h2>
Survey results, Author provided
Complaints about chores, however, pale in comparison to those about lack of privacy in the family home. This is the result of a combination of family members not respecting personal boundaries but also of many contemporary housing designs (open-plan living, for instance) that are not suitable for multigenerational needs. 
As Bruce Judd discusses in his chapter, some older housing models, including the resurgence of granny flats, may offer better outcomes to people who want to live together in multigenerational homes.
<h2>What does it all mean?</h2>
Despite the media and some academic spheres giving this household form more attention, there is still relatively little known about it, and particularly the experiences of those who choose to live in them. As this journalist realised, there are pros and cons to multigenerational living, just as there are pros and cons to living alone. 
International policy recommendations are advocating for more diverse housing products to house our ever-changing household forms. This includes encouraging people “to share our homes more with other generations and encourage greater intergenerational living”. 
To devise the most practical policies do this effectively, we must have a greater understanding of the outcomes for different members within the household.
Edgar Liu is research Fellow at City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Australia and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/edgar-liu-32200" target="_blank">here</a>.
Hazel Easthope is senior research fellow, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Australia and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/hazel-easthope-175163" target="_blank">here</a>.
Both are authors for The Conversation.
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