Dozy Writes

I am in a somewhat nostalgic mood at the moment and as a result I have been thinking about how our lives have changed over the last 10 – 20 years.

One of the biggest changes is the reduction in landline telephones in the home.

I recently discovered that as of March 2024, there will be no more printed phone books in the UK unless you ask for a copy – the information will of course still be available online.

Let me be clear, I’m not bemoaning the end of this process. I have watched the printed versions of the phone book become thinner each year as the number of landline telephones dwindles accordingly. It seems ridiculous to keep printing something that we can find online, especially when most phone books sit on a shelf gathering dust.

Or do they?

Last year, I watched as the forgotten phone book was utilised in an investigation that would have stalled without its existence.

I was at a relative’s house which is out in the country and a neighbour phoned to say that he had rescued some sheep he had seen wandering on the road. He was trying to find out where they might have come from as he currently had them corralled in his garden to keep them safe and avoid an accident on the very busy adjoining road. 

The neighbour wasn’t as familiar with the local farmers and asked my relative for help. I watched in fascination as my relative leapt into action and pulled out the dusty phone book to find the landline numbers of farmers in the area, phoning each one to establish if it might be some of their flock that had escaped.

After a few phone calls, the owner of the wayward sheep was discovered and arrangements were made to return them to their field. 

How do you contact your neighbours?

There were a couple of points in this scenario that struck me as interesting. The first being that the ability to get in touch with your neighbours in an emergency situation is becoming almost impossible as the number of landlines dwindle.

There is no phone book for mobile phones so unless you have shared that information with your neighbours, you can’t get in touch with each other.

Of course, I understand that we have a variety of other methods in which we can contact each other, mainly different forms of social media, but not everyone is on the same platform, if at all, so it’s more awkward.

Perhaps that isn’t such an issue in a more condensed housing area but it becomes more problematic in the country where houses can be spread quite far apart.

Apart from the fact that it was easier to memorise landline numbers as we generally only needed to remember the last three or four digits, even if we didn’t remember them we could dig out the phone book, or look online, to find the number.

This scenario made me wonder why we don’t have a phone book for mobile phone numbers.

I imagine it’s because, despite the fact that we are permanently attached to our mobile phones, we don’t want to use them as an actual phone. In addition, I suppose that people change their numbers too frequently and, by their very definition, mobile phones do not have a fixed location which would be problematic for listing in a phone book.

Similarly, we use social media but there isn’t that much of an appetite to be sociable in real life. We seem to be limiting our interactions and, in the process, we run the risk of reducing the sense of community within the areas that we live.

The loss of community

This brings me to my second point that occurred to me during this scenario. My relative knew the farmers in the area because he’s lived there for a long time whereas more recent neighbours don’t know their fellow neighbours beyond a couple of houses on either side.

This is a notable difference in how it used to be in this area where everyone knew each other – they might not have known everyone particularly well but they knew the names of their neighbours within a larger radius. 

Perhaps this is an indication of a bigger change in how we live and interact within our communities. Technology has opened the world up to us all and yet, in terms of where we live, our worlds have become smaller.  

There are a number of possible reasons for why this is happening.

Busy lives

We seem to lead busier lives in the modern world leaving us with less time. Despite the fact that we have many more time-saving conveniences both at home and in the workplace, we appear to have filled the gap with more activities.

Cars

Owning a car allows us to travel further afield, working and socialising somewhere other than  the place where we live. According to the National Travel Survey, the number of households without a car in the UK in 2022 was only 22% compared to 48% in 1971.

Indifference or mistrust

We may not be interested in our neighbours so we don’t make the effort to get to know them. It’s easier to be indifferent, particularly if we don’t think we have much in common with them. 

Alternatively, we may be suspicious of them and wish to keep our distance.

Housing design

In developed countries, modern design for housing areas focuses on the need for space and privacy which doesn’t generally align with building a community.

Walls, fences, hedges and screens protect us from the prying eyes of our neighbours. We don’t want to see our neighbours and we don’t want them to see us.

Technology

Advances in technology mean we can run our entire lives without stepping outside of our house. Our entertainment, shopping and social lives can be conducted safely within the comfort of our homes, without ever having to speak to our neighbours. 

Changes to shop opening hours

If we do decide to step outside of our homes, longer opening hours for shops makes it easier to pop out in the evening if we run out of something rather than going next door to ask our neighbour for some sugar.

I’m not sure why it is always sugar that people run out of.

Overstimulation

We are subjected to a staggering amount of information daily which can leave us feeling overwhelmed. 

A study by the University of California-San Diego found that the average American consumes about 34 GB of data and information every day. In UK terms, that’s the equivalent of processing over 2.2 billion words per day or watching over 30 hours of video. 

Every day.

The same study also found that our brains have the capacity to consume as much as 74 GB per day although another study by University College London (UCL) found that we have a limited supply of energy to our brains meaning that there is an upper limit on how much we can process.

It is little wonder that our brains are overwhelmed and we feel too exhausted to communicate with others when we are at home.

So it seems that we are either out gallivanting somewhere or we are barricaded in our homes. Whichever one it is, the result is that we don’t know our neighbours as well as we used to.

Why does it matter?

You might think that this doesn’t matter and perhaps for the most part it doesn’t. But imagine a scenario where there is an emergency in your home and you need some assistance. Or not even an emergency, just a situation where you need a helping hand.

If you don’t have your neighbours’ phone numbers and you can’t leave the house, who are you going to call? Not Ghostbusters, in case you’re wondering.

But seriously, who can you call on for assistance if you don’t have a relationship with your neighbours?

In a world with few landlines and a dwindling sense of community we are becoming more isolated which doesn’t seem like a particularly wise way to live.