Phones Are For People

[Hello, Atlantic readers. Yes, that’s my photograph over there. There’s more on the Anti-Digit Dialing League in this previous post.]

I am now the proud custodian of a copy of the Anti-Digit Dialing League’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). This pamphlet seems to qualify as scarce: I found one copy for sale online. Thanks, SuburbanBooks.

The pamphlet is ten pages. The cover cartoon — “Hello, 274-435-4946? This is 483-235-5897” — is by Bob Bastian. A listing of the League’s Board of Directors appears on what would be the title page: Hiram Johnson III (1914–1992, attorney, grandson of a California governor-then-senator), Jack Block (1924–2010, professor of psychology at U Cal Berkeley), Bonnie Burgon (“editorial assistant,” associated at one point with ETC: A Review of General Semantics), Robert Carrow (1934–2008, attorney), S.I. Hayakawa (1906–1992, professor of English at San Francisco State, later a senator), Carl V. May (“public relations counselor”), and John D. Schick (“investments”).

Phones Are For People makes its case in Q. and A. format, entertaining possible objections and making clear the reasonableness of the case, as if to say, “We’re not, not — I repeat not — a bunch of crackpots.” It is 1962 after all, and they are Questioning Authority. Here is the group’s origin story:

The Anti-Digit Dialing League started over a cup of coffee in San Francisco when the conversation, quite by accident, drifted to the new Digit Dialing system. Both coffee drinkers had found the new system extremely confusing and difficult to use. They also wondered whether the change was really necessary. As a consequence they inserted a tiny notice in the classified section of a newspaper inquiring whether other people had experienced the same thoughts. They signed the ad, Anti-Digit Dialing League.

The response was incredible. Over thirty-five hundred people responded within ten days in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. As word about ADDL spread throughout the country, people wrote in wanting to start chapters of ADDL in other cities across the country. It quickly became obvious that ADDL was expressing a deep but previously unorganized concern of telephone users that the telephone company had somehow forgotten about them. This is the reason that ADDL started; it was an expression of widespread concern.

Another excerpt:

Q. But isn’t all this fuss simply a tempest in a teapot? Aren’t the people opposing Digit Dialing really just opposing progress? Isn’t the present furor nothing more than an emotional reaction to any kind of change?

A. Most decidedly not! Most people, and certainly the members of ADDL, welcome constructive change. However, the telephone is an extremely important part of everyday life, and major changes in its use will have widespread effects.

And according to this pamphlet, the opposition to digit dialing finds strong support in science. The ADDL points to “numerous psychological experiments” confirming that it is easier to memorize letters and numbers than numbers alone, and easier still to memorize names and numbers. The ADDL points also to a 1955 finding that seventy-five percent of adults could not remember a sequence of seven digits. Why then the move to digit dialing? Not, according to the ADDL, because of a looming shortage of telephone numbers: by its calculations, more than 820 million numbers are available by means of exchange names and numbers. No, the reason for the switch is ease in achieving “internal automation.” Nice try, telephone company. The ADDL isn’t buying:

But automation is an advance only if it frees people and takes them away from what is undignified and better done by machines. Digit Dialing places an added burden upon people by requiring them to fulfill the needs dictated by accounting machines and computers.

I’m surprised and disappointed to see that the humble poetry of exchange names plays only a small part in the ADDL’s argument, mentioned in passing before the emphasis on utility starts up again:

The reasons for preferring such historic exchanges as KLondike or YUkon or BUtterfield or MUrrayhill are not simply sentimental or emotional. Because of their traditional value, such named exchanges are much easier to remember and to use.

So instead of a paean to exchange names, I found “numerous psychological experiments.” I would have joined anyway. The $2.00 membership donation got you a membership card and badge.

If, fifty years later, anyone from the ADDL is out there, I would love to hear from you.

[June 2019: Phones Are for People is copyrighted; I’m not in a position to share scanned copies. There’s a listing for the pamphlet in the WorldCat.]

Sherry Turkle on the flight from conversation

Sherry Turkle writes about the flight from conversation:

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

I see the flight from conversation every day in college hallways: a dozen or more students waiting to enter a classroom, every student silent, sitting or standing against the wall and staring at a device. The students are, as Turkle would say, “alone together.” And yes, I talk with my students about this phenomenon, which, I admit, I find unnerving.

The saddest details in Turkle’s piece: a high-school student who “wishes he could talk to artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating,” and another who says, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

Literary reading, standardized tests

Clair Needell Hollander, New York City teacher, on literary reading and standardized tests:

We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.

Teach the Books, Touch the Heart (New York Times)

The new Blogger interface, unliked

If you (too) use Blogger and have misgivings about the new interface, here’s a good place to voice them, a “problem rollup” post at Google Groups: I do not like the new Blogger interface because.

My main complaints: the text-box for composing and editing is much too large, and the new interface remains broken on the iPad. For Google to switch users to the new interface before getting the iPad problem worked out would be unconscionable. But it looks as though we’re headed toward unconscionable.

[Is Google’s non-reponse to the iPad problem related to Apple–Google hostilities? I wonder.]

“Pineapples don’t have sleeves”

A Daniel Pinkwater story, adapted for a standardized test, is in the news.

[I discovered Pinkwater’s books in adulthood. My favorites: Aunt Lulu and Young Adult Novel.]

Mitt/Mark and the big trees

[Mark Trail, April 21, 2012.]

Too weird. Today’s Mark Trail sheds new light on what Mitt/Mark may have meant when he averred that the trees in Michigan are “the right height.” The right height for what, Governor Trail? What are you and they hiding?

Related posts
Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail
Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail, learning from experience

[Yes, Mitt Romney and Mark Trail are the same (two-dimensional) person. “Tom” would appear to be Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who endorsed Romney earlier this week.]

Music Man Murray

Streaming at NPR: Music Man Murray, a 2011 film by Richard Parks. Murray is eighty-eight-year-old Murray Gershenz, seeking a buyer for the contents of his Los Angeles record store. With music by Van Dyke Parks.

[It’s Record Store Day.]

Should I check e-mail?

A flow chart by Wendy McNaughton (via Coudal).

“It isn’t creative at all!”

Elizabeth Bishop, from a letter to anthologist John Frederick Nims, written on the last day of her life, October 6, 1979:

You can see what a nasty teacher I must be — but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them. (I suggested buying a small paper-back and almost the whole class whines “Where can I find it?”) My best example of this sort of thing is what one rather bright Harvard honors student told me. She told her room-mate or a friend — who had obviously taken my verse-writing course — that she was doing her paper with me and the friend said “Oh don’t work with her! It’s awful! She wants you to look words up in the dictionary! It isn’t creative at all!” In other words, it is better not to know what you’re writing or reading.

From Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008).

Related posts
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar
Lines from Elizabeth Bishop

Move that prepositional phrase

From the Huffington Post:

See also: Godwin’s law.

[Thanks, Elaine.]