20
Popular Culture Review
Consider the way in which the telephone alone has changed our
culture since its introduction and in its various technological iterations.
Although it seems that we have as a culture completely bought-in to the
technology that is sold to us, we could give a brief deconstructive—even
psychoanalytic—reading of what is taking place, and in doing so, see
that on some fundamental level we already know that it is all bad. On a
fundamental level, what we really long for is the ability to be face-toface and not have the technological media changing and transforming us
in the ways that they do. The telephone is an example that suggests that
perhaps the technology is well aware that its promise of community is a
lie. An example of how communications technology is actually on a
collision course with its own inherent contradictions.
Nineteen-eighty-eight was the year that the first transatlantic
fiber-optic cable went into service. It was able to carry 40,000 telephone
calls simultaneously underneath the ocean, and the quality of the calls
was said to improve drastically in terms of the noise on the line. Mobile
phones—^phones without lines—had been available since 1983, but
hardly anyon