I’ve been reading this collection of Bradbury short stories. Last night I read one called “The Murderer”. I believe it was written some time shortly before 1952. It’s about a guy who’s being committed for “murdering” electronics, and his interview with the psychiatrist includes this:
“Suppose you tell me when you first began to hate the telephone.”
…”Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies. Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. …my horror chamber of a radio wrist watch on which my friends and wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such ‘conveniences’ that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? ‘Hello, hello!’ I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, ‘Where are you now dear?’ and a friend calls and says, ‘Got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy—’ And a stranger calls and cries out, ‘This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant!’ Well!”
I don’t imagine I’m the first person to read this story in the last few years and laugh her ass off, thinking of twitter, facebook, myspace, dodgeball… and well, what started off with the car phone, I guess. (Or the fully portable mobile phone, the “radio wrist watch”!)
“It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy.” IRC, anyone? O prescient sci-fi writers!
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