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Telephone Etiquette

When the telephone was invented, it was a sensation, although not entirely a positive one. News reports from the early 1900s make mention of ghosts travelling through telephone lines as well as people losing hearing in their right ear because they only ever placed the receiver against their left ear. Along with questions about the physical and supernatural effects of the telephone came deliberations about etiquette. What was the proper greeting? Alexander Graham Bell proposed “Ahoy hoy,” while Thomas Edison preferred “Hello.”

As early as 1907, people complained about rudeness over the telephone. One journalist pointed out: “The general use of the telephone, instead of promoting civility and courtesy, is the means of the fast dying out of what little we have left.” Today, the vast majority of people frequently have cellphones with them and one-third of those people never turn the things off. This ever-connected culture involves a still-developing set of social rules about what’s acceptable in terms of phone usage. For instance, 77 percent of all adults think it is generally acceptable for people to use their cellphones while walking down the street and 75 percent believe it is acceptable to use phones on public transit. But only 38 percent think it is fine to use cellphones at restaurants, and just 5 percent think it is not a problem to use a cellphone at a meeting.

What does it mean to use a cellphone anyway? Sometimes a phone is just a phone: when you talk into it to a human being who is in another location. But much of the time, we use a phone for other things. It is a device for sending your co-worker a quick e-mail, for instagramming a nice-looking meal or latte, and for googling whatever conversation topic you are discussing. A Pew survey found that people between the ages of 18 and 29 are more likely to say these various uses in public situations are acceptable—and that’s not surprising. This is the same demographic that tends to text more than talk.

As a result, the question of telephone etiquette, depending on whom you ask, has become a question about the social acceptability of computer use. Most cellphone owners now have smartphones, which are as much phones as they are camcorders and publishing devices. “It is important to note, though, that Americans of all ages generally trend in the same direction about when it is OK or not to use cells in public settings,” according to Pew Research. That’s the thing about etiquette, and obtrusiveness for that matter: It’s all situational and, to some degree, personal. Behaviour that seems outrageous in one setting is perfectly fine in another.