In a recent New York Times article titled, “Don’t Call me, I Won’t Call You” Pamela Paul discusses the change in attitudes, in the United States, towards chatting on the phone for the sake of chatting. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/fashion/20Cultural.html Verbal communication on the phone is being replaced with text-messages. People don’t feel the need to answer their phones if they don’t want to.
This is not true in Rwanda.
When seeing Rwandans answering the phone at, what seems to me, to be the most inappropriate times – in the middle of meetings and even at funerals – it does not seem so strange if you think about the cell phone the way we used to think about land-line phones ringing. In that context, not answering the phone would be very rude. Almost like someone knocking on your door and you deciding not to answer – in fact, perhaps in the United States landlines were looked at almost like knocking on the door until recently.
During the training at Agahozo-Shalom, there is a session on the different levels of listening, and turning off the cell phone when meeting with students – or at meetings in general – was discussed. When one councilor turned his cell phone off in front of a student before they began speaking in a meeting, the student was shocked that the phone was turned off just for him. And again – if you compare the cell phone to the land line, that is kind of shocking. Imagine, when we only had landlines, turning off the phone – as in, unplugging it – before a meeting? In my Orthodox Jewish family, nobody ever thought to turn off our land-line before Shabbat (the Sabbath), when electricity is forbidden. Today, many religious Jews do turn off their cell phones. I don't think it's because they are becoming more religious.
It’s easy to say, “Ah, but cell phones can be easily turned off and, at the very least, put on silent. And we have devices for text messaging on cell phones. That explains the decrease in talking on the phone.” But how hard would it have been to create a landline with text messaging? And we did have beepers, but no one really used those like people text today. And would it have really been so difficult to create a landline where you only had to press a button to put it on silent? In fact, there may have been such a button, but no one ever used it. More likely, cell phones were designed because people got used to not talking on the phone as much. I don’t think it’s because of e-mailing, either. I remember when caller ID was invented – in other words, it was at least fifty years after the landline became widespread and for public use. Fifty years of no one thinking to create a way to screen calls. I honestly think that cell phones in Africa are at the place landlines were in the United States for fifty years. And I think landlines were treated the way a knock on the door was treated before landlines – something that could not be ignored.
People are starting to check their e-mail on cell phones in Rwanda, but that just may be because people are less likely to have computers. And, to be honest, only relatively wealthy professionals tend to use their phones for internet. Bluetooth is sort of popular, probably because it is the easiest way to get data in the absence of wide-spread computer ownership. But, to be honest again, it’s mostly just wealthy professionals and techies that know about bluetooth. The technology that is most popular, among all who are at least middle-class, is the ability to put two SIM cards in a phone so that calling to other countries is easier, which is on the rise as people move to other countries for jobs. Most active duel SIM phones seem to come from China, where active dual SIM phones are becoming popular.
A lot of the things that you think would be easy to on a landline would not have been easy to do at all, 40 years ago. They did have machines that could be used to send text over phone lines, and print it out on paper (displaying text on a screen was not something I ever saw done until 1975). They were called teletype machines (TTY's), and were only used by deaf people, who otherwise couldn't use phones at all, because they were much more expensive and much bigger than phones. They even had machines that could send text over telegraph wires, and print it out automatically, before telephones were invented, at least as early as the 1870s. I read about that recently in a book about the history of Maxwell's equations. Before I read that, I thought telegraph operators had to listen to dots and dashes with earphones, and type out the text by hand. The machines must have done all this with wheels and gears, since electronics hadn't been invented yet. But those automatic telegraph machines were much too expensive for people to have in their homes. They were only used by telegraph companies.
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