“I started to distrust telephones the instant they stopped working. I can’t pinpoint when that was—the first time I ‘dropped’ a call, or someone said, ‘I’m losing you’—and I don’t know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned.”
Virginia Heffernan
more infosource: “Funeral for a Friend,” The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2010.
category: analog, communication, technology, telephone
medium: newspaper article
“The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.”
Vivian Gornick
more infosource: “Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
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category: communication, letter, loneliness, solitude, technology, telephone
medium: newspaper article
telephone