STUMBLE YOU MIGHT FALL [431]

The BT Tower, seen from St Paul's Cathedral

Leaving home for work as usual, I opened the BBC Sounds app on my phone to play BBC Radio 6 Music. Chris Hawkins has a brilliant weekly feature about people’s names heard unintentionally during songs, and as the time for it approached, the app would not load. Sometimes it takes a while, but realising this was taking longer than usual, I opened my web browser to stream the station via the BBC’s website. This also failed to load, along with any other website I tried.

Arriving at my bus stop, unable to check why my phone had no internet signal, I hoped the bus company’s app will let me catch the bus. Restarting my phone did not re-establish any connection. Fortunately, I was able to carry on my journey, as whatever codes needed for the app to work today must have downloaded previously.

Unaccustomed to travelling in silence, and with my MP3 player at home, I was resigned to listening to music saved to my phone before the near-unlimited choice of a music streaming app made purchases rare. I compromised with the Muzak Corporation’s “Stimulus Progression 5” background music album, various songs by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and the reworked version of David Bowie’s 1987 “Never Let Me Down” album released in 2018, an interesting exercise that could still have been left alone. Listening to the sublime original “Rawlinson End” piece by Vivian Stanshall, I thought of looking up more information about it, then had to sit there realising I could not – I couldn’t leave my bus to work to stop at a library.

Finally logging into my work computer confirmed that Vodafone, my mobile network, had an outage of their 4G and 5G internet networks, but not phone calls and text messages – Vodafone introduced text messages to the world, so maintaining its use must be a point of pride. I thought the internet came back just before starting work at 9am, but this was after going to an area of the building with poor reception (the staff toilets) caused my phone to search out the still operating 3G network instead. This network will be phased out by Vodafone during 2024 to bolster 4G and 5G reception, a good idea in the circumstances, but GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), introduced in 2001 and still used for calls and messages, will remain.

Cybernetics is a subject I plan to discuss in greater detail in coming weeks, but nothing serves to focus your mind on the science of control systems, communications and technology than being temporarily kicked out of such a control system. As much as I would like to think I could live without the internet, I have surely arrived at the point where any period of disconnection will cause frustration. Its initial usefulness became a welcome extension of myself, and it may be time to properly make sense of that.

Everything was back to my new normal by 11am, and I listened to Chris Hawkins’ radio feature during lunchtime.

IF YOU DON’T ANSWER, I’LL JUST RING IT OFF THE WALL [136]

There appears not to have been a time before the mobile phone or, if there was, it exists in an alternative reality, one where Biff Tannen did not turn the Hill Valley courthouse into a casino. More seriously, the mobile phone has changed how we live, changed our habits, and changed our infrastructure. Like with the World Wide Web, I will be one of the last, at age thirty-five, to remember a time without them.

I had to remind myself of how I used to keep in touch – I actually remember once having to wait until somebody finished using a payphone before I could make my own call, using my pre-paid BT Phonecard. That all changed in 2000 when, ahead of my seventeenth birthday, I bought my first mobile phone, just as they started becoming affordable to everyone. By that year, just over half of UK adults had one.

I’m not sure why I bought the phone I did, but I guess I recognised the name “Philips” more than “Nokia,” who made the phones everyone else had at the time. The Philips Savvy was introduced in 1999, and was a chunky black and blue brick of a basic phone. Its big buttons make it clear it has only one use – cameras were not commonplace on phones for another five years.

If I wasn’t using it to call or send an SMS message – the manual confirms SMS stands for “Short Message Service” - the other reason I had the Savvy in my hand was to unscrew and screw in its external aerial, as a way of keeping your hands busy. Unlike the black slate smartphones for today, if I broke the aerial, I could just buy a new one, and I could replace the battery with a new one, or one I charged earlier, or one with a bigger capacity, which needed its own bigger back cover. Standby time was measured in days, but you could only do so much with the Savvy.

With no information available on internal storage capacity, saving contacts, SMS messages and call history appears to be down to the SIM card only. Details of the last twenty calls you made, and the last ten you received, is the most you can have. No internet service is possible, but you do get a calculator and stopwatch. The LCD screen had space for two lines of text and an icon – the home screen displayed the time using a clock face. There is a primitive pre-emoji list of twenty-five characters you can send with SMS messages, but only an emoticon is sent if the recipient doesn’t have the same phone as you. Short pre-prepared SMS messages are provided, like “please call me back, or “I will be late” – the first such message had only been sent in 1992, over the Vodafone network, and people were not expected to take time writing long messages. The only other “app” was a “biorhythm calendar,” using your birthday and a given date to show your results for Chance, Love, Energy and Success. Amuse your friends, if you can.

In the year 2000 alone, payphone use declined by 12% in the UK – BT responded by increasing the minimum call charge for the first time since 1984, from 10p to 20p, and began charging for directory enquiry calls. BT Phonecards were withdrawn in 2002, except within the prison service. From the peak of 92,000 phone boxes in 1992, there are now only 40,000 on UK streets, with BT expecting to halve that total by 2022.

For all its limitations, I used my Philips Savvy for four years, longer than any other phone I had since. I finally joined the Nokia brigade in 2004 with a 3510i, an updated version of one of the first phones to have a colour screen, and 2007 established the two-year contract pattern to which practically everyone follows. Today, speaking as the owner of a phone that insists on using glass, it would be nice to use a phone I can drop, or throw, with abandon.