In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short leash. They both immediately agreed that since they now carried cell phones, their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home. I was a bit shocked, because I was talking about them, not my wife, but I didn't say anything more. (I got a cell phone shortly after anyway.)
There were several years where having BOTH was desirable. Cell service was expensive, and battery life was short, so many folks carried a beeper that was always on, and a phone they turned on if they needed to make a call and had no land line option.
I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.
> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.
You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope. People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a human being on the other end.
Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with robodialers and mixed messaging methods.
True. Conversations were dropped as soon as a phone rang. Mind you, this was also because most people didn't even have a caller ID display or answering machine so if you didn't answer you had no idea who had called. The curiosity factor was strong. These days I don't answer when I don't recognise the number.
The expectation of actually catching someone was much lower than these days though. Because of course not being at home meant not being reachable.
There's was also this unwritten rule about not calling people too late, which doesn't really happen anymore in my circles since people can now see whether you're active (eg on WhatsApp) and switch their phone on DnD when they sleep anyway.
Every communication channel fills with spam. Unless there's a direct disincentive like the cost of a Fedex overnight envelope, or strong moderation marketers/spammers will eventually comprise the majority of volume. Sometimes it's the "content" "creators" themselves who fill the channel with native advertising and clickbait.
> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.
Do you though? Because people on the other end will often demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with you. This is why people consider it a leash.
You mean the message contents, or that you received a notification at all? On both ios and android you should be able to configure the notification so the contents are not shown, so it shows that there's a notification from whatsapp but not the message itself.
Grow a back bone. You can paraphrase "fuck off" in a nice but firm way, which is called setting a boundary. And if you dont' set them yourself, others will set them for you.
Not at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.
One of the earliest labor principle is "if you can do it, you'll be forced to do it". Sometimes adding your capability will result in more burden to you instead of less. This is why sometimes it's a good idea to hide the fact that you're good with computer to your family; lest you become their tech support.
Maybe, it's not out of the question that some would do that but I've never had the feeling it was common or desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my guess.
A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge.
I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.
Or, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before charging every day like you would a few years later once you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's the time period original commenter was talking about, and why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s.
It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)
I really liked that the phone was mine, work didn't call me. The pager was for work, and they had to use that to get me to come in for issues. Nice clean separation.
I have actually enjoyed having both at previous jobs. If you’re oncall and you use your phone to receive oncall pages, you can’t turn it off or turn off notifications or even silence it. Having a separate physical device you can receive pages on keeps you less tied to your phone.
If I end up in this situation again I might try and get a cheap burner phone and only install the pager app on it.
...and some early cell phones couldn't even receive incoming calls so you still had to have a pager. Even after this was fixed it took a few years for incoming calls to work reliably when you were outside your home area.
This is always such a weird flex. There are so many things I use my smartphone for, 99.9% of which is NOT being a short leash for anyone to communicate with me. I can't remember the last time I had a conversation on my phone.
Spotify/Audible/etc in my car. Google maps/Apple maps. When I go camping I have overlanding/camping/blm apps that are constantly updated with openings, etc. Weather apps so I know to put the top of my jeep/car on to not get rained in. Uber/Lyft of which I use multiple times a week. Bank apps. Investment apps. Checking the news/hockey/whatever when I'm out and about. Looking up facts my friends and I argue over while knocking back beers. Checking to see if anyone has stolen/broken into my car. Launching my botvac. Controlling my AC from anywhere. Plex..
Everyone survived without them, sure, but everyone survived without computers for a long time and now they've given us massive convenience.
It's far more a computer in my pocket than a telephone.
I resisted having a phone at all until 2013. People were amazed even then.
I ended up getting one for development. It proved useful enough that I used it myself, but I've managed to limit usage to WhatsApp (and SMS), web reading (like HN now) and not much else.
Lots of Web stuff (especially financial stuff) requires 2FA so SMS is now more-or-less required.
People have learnt though that my phone is always on silent, and I mostly don't check it during the day. I don't have email on it, and I don't do social media. I treat it as "my device" not as an "interruption device".
Of course the joy of them is that for every person it's different. You can use it whatever way you prefer.
As someone younger who grew up in a time where you would get a cell phone during teenage years, I can't say I empathize with your view of "my device" vs "interruption device".
Although there are likely an overwhelming majority of my peers who do have an interruption device phone, I refuse my phone not be My device, and I explicitly buy phones that I know I can customize (unlock bootloaders, flash roms, or simply just know it has the interop capabilities I need to make it my own). Where this is in opposition with your statement is that I do have social media, mail and even work email on my phone, I just chose to customize it to not be interrupting to work and personal life (though obviously that line is different for everyone).
Of course I'm not saying your way is wrong at all, just sharing my experience.
Not GP but this thread is great. I was among the first in my city school to get a cell phone and text in ~2001, and then the last to get an iPhone in ~2015, and then stop carrying it most of the time in ~2016/in airplane mode and then cease to have a cell phone at all in ~2022. Texting kinda ceased after 2013 when I moved states temporarily and went thru some stuff, never resumed.
I'm notoriously unreachable, perhaps even offensively unreachable, and I'm starting to look for time and money savings to justify getting a new one/repairing the SE if possible. Eg. I'd save $10+/mo in Starbucks refills if I had that app, enough of those cases to cover the bill.
My next phone will be like parent poster's. I had iOS setup with no notifications except Venmo and a priority email alias. Currently I'm using an Unbuntu laptop where I can get to Google Voice that was activated with a Mint Mobile trial on Starbucks wifi. Am homeless, actually been able to secure and hold a couple labor/hospitality jobs like this.
Mines usually on silent too because certain individuals abuse it and I don't like hearing it ping and boop and beep every 30 seconds. None of this is urgent stuff.
I have notifications disabled on everything except for when my credit cards are used, calls and texts. Even then, I have a whitelist for call notifications and a blacklist for text notifications, and silent hours at night that only my mother can bypass. I am no longer bothered by every nagging app or fake urgency.
I do the same. I hate "notifications" and very few things are so potentially important that I need to be interrupted by them. Effectively zero notifications have any real urgency. Also apps and websites treat notifications like an invitation to spam you. I default deny every request for notifications.
My phone stays on silent, and I use it more like a pager and email program. I check it it 4 or 5 times a day, but it serves me and I don't serve it. I imagine if I had kids I'd be a bit different with it and not block anything from them, but otherwise, being able to get my attention a few times a day when I check it should be enough for anyone.
I'd very much like if everyone was forced to use buzzer only. The annoyance of people having to let everyone know they have a phonecall which cannot wait is borderline insulting.
In my organization all people have work phones, but they are rarely used to call people. When I get a call from coworkers it is usually emergency stuff where it makes sense for them to call me — rarely outside of my work hours. All the rest are emails or chat messages, which I can read when I decide to do so.
I am okay with that.
Although a smartphone related work horror story I heard once, was somebodies boss who communicated the plans for the week for 12 employees in one 40 minute rambling speech message, which may or may not involve crucial need-to-know information at minute 35 and 30 seconds of information that affected you.
Alternatively, we get better at ignoring notifications.
The same way people somewhat adapted to urban noise by better insulation and noise proofing, having a phone in dnd most of the time is I think a must nowadays.
You still can pay attention when you want, potentially at some regular intervals you set for yourself, and ignore it the rest of the time.
Honestly if you were able to live without a phone until now, living without Gmail (or what you call a mainstream email) is pretty easy.
There are still plenty of email providers left and right that will allows you to subscribe without a phone number. You’ll probably have to pay though. What may be harder in this precise use case is getting a domain name (which is not mandatory but really helpful if you want to be able to switch providers easily) but I’m pretty sure you can still register domains with a landline number.
I've been maintaining my own mail server for almost 20 years. The thing though, I found that sometimes I end up needing to use one of the bigger email providers like gmail, apple mail, etc because otherwise my mail is classified as spam.
Probably depends on how digitized things are where they live and how much of that they interact with.
Where I live, going without a phone would be incredibly tedious, as it handles bus and train tickets, tracking for hourly busses, no ATMs within walking distance and it's basically standard for local events to do "sign in" by having you scan a QR code and so on.
Not having a phone would mean budgeting much more time for going anywhere and having to carry change for the bus.
But if you have a car, you get to bypass most of that, no need to worry about tickets or tracking, ATMs don't need to be very local either. Then if you don't really care about attending local events, you get to avoid everything.
If on top of that, if your job is accomodating, you could conceivably go without a phone entirely. My job would crawl to a near stop if my coworkers had to wait for me to be in front of a laptop/desktop to respond to them.
The NUMBER 1 most annoying thing about not having a phone in the modern day is ticketing services / events. The second is Uber/Lyft/etc (though less of an issue in cities with public transit).
Thanksfully in many cities in the world regular taxis do still operate. In my city they aren't necessarily more expensive than Uber. It depends of the kind of route and time of the day/night. Sometimes you pay more, sometimes you pay less.
Here in Germany, the "Deutschlandticket", a country-wide public transportation ticket, is currently valid only via smartphone or "Chipkarte" (smart card). Unfortunately that smart card isn't available everywhere and won't be before early next year. It seems rather like a policy snafu then intended though [1].
I’ve been seeing more and more events that only have digital tickets. They say it almost like it’s a point of pride… all the paper they’re saving, or something.
> their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home.
Wouldn't it be more annoying to get home, and then have to go out again to get the milk? What they probably meant was that they didn't ever want to go to the store themselves and wanted their spouse to do it.
This interview on Fresh Air goes into why pagers have continued to be used in hospitals (tl;dr: cell-phone communication gives a faster turnaround, but the lower barrier to communication means that people will go to the on-call person more often than they would with the beeper where they’re more likely to find their own solution).
Well, that article also mentioned the 'other service', i.e. FM, which more readily penetrates buildings and underground facilities and covers wider areas. And if there is a disaster, there's always the danger that remaining cells in the affected area are overcrowded.
