Ringing Out of Time - lofi-liminal

Ringing Out of Time:

The Payphone as a Cultural Artefact

Prepared for

Dr. Jim Brown
Digital Studies Center
Rutgers – Camden
Camden, NJ

Prepared by

Jillina Harken
Digital Studies Center
Rutgers – Camden
Camden, NJ

Project Description:

What would today’s society do with a brand new fully-functioning pay phone dropped right into the middle of their normal everyday lives? Well, that is exactly what I want to know, specifically in the case of the Rutgers-Camden campus located within the quad between the library, fine arts building, and campus center. This will be an installation of a technology from a bygone era that would bring light to the reality of what a payphone was, giving people the chance to interact authentically with a historical artifact that helped shape the world’s telecommunications networks before they went wireless. This is important because there are so many ways that the world is shifting and changing that things like obsolete technology often get pushed to the side, forgotten, and even the technologies that changed the landscape of our world and society become buried under the weight of time.

Bringing older technologies back is a way to experiment with the experiences that were a landmark of the human experience in past times. It helps to highlight the culture that informed the world we live in today. Doing this outside of the confines of a museum or lab allows more accessibility for non-academic encounters with the defunct technology. In this specific case the technology in question is the payphone, an object that was designed to survive hard use and changing weather conditions. This makes it a perfect example of a technology that would benefit from being brought back for limited interaction with participants in locations where it can get traction based on the novelty of the item.

This project seeks to make people consider the communications devices in our world through the experience of the phone booth. There was a time the pay phone was the “mobile communication device” of our society. We have evolved from that point and as we consider both where the phone started – back with Mr. Bell – and where telecommunication technology may go in the future, we may begin to think up new paths that developing technology may take as it continues to evolve. This theory is encouraged by the writing of Fickers and van den Oever in their book Doing Experimental Media Archaeology, “One reason we seek a physical engagement with these historical artefacts is to stimulate our imagination of the past: to reflect critically on the hidden or non-verbalised, sensorial, corporal, and tacit knowledge that informs our engagement with media technologies” (Fickers and van den Oever 42). According to the arguments of Fickers and Van den Oever, bringing older technologies into spaces where they can be experimented with can help encourage a deeper understanding of the technology, infrastructure, and item itself. The first step to this, as outlined in Doing Experimental Media Archaeology, is to remove the sensory bias that many researchers have developed as a way to remove their personal bias from their work. In de-sensitizing the researcher they are able to experience an object, situation, or idea with a new outlook and begin to think outside of the box. “We propose forms of hands-on experimentation which support a self-reflexive approach to historical knowledge production and highlight the contemporary situatedness of the historian-experimenter. If anything, the experimental practices we propose aim at emphasising the need for critical reflection on the concepts of historical authenticity, accuracy, experience, and imagination” (Fickers van den Oever 118). One of their main reasons for promoting this hands-on approach is because they understand that they cannot reproduce the exact experience of working with these defunct technologies (Fickers van den Oever 69), but they can create a situation in which “the careful documentation and self-reflexive analysis of such an experimental practice will be greatly beneficial for the fields of media archaeology, media history, and material and museum studies” (Fickers van den Oever 69).

The idea for this project is also heavily influenced by the work of Keller Easterling, specifically from her book Medium Design. Easterling argues that her own project sees space as a medium: “By looking at space as a medium, it is in dialogue with all those—media theorists among them—who are returning to the Latin root of the word ‘medium,’ medius” (Easterling 12). Following Easterling’s advice to look at space as a medium, this project would be more than just viewing the phone booth as a whole. We are not just “looking at a phone booth.” We are looking at a historical cultural artifact, looking at how people used to interact with the payphone, watching how they would interact with it now, thinking about what it meant as a communication device, and viewing the reality of how it helped to shape the telecommunications world. Most importantly, I invite the participants to become the users – by placing it in a public setting, like payphones were in the past – thereby experiencing this slice of the past for themselves. The interaction then changes the entire location as a medium; the sight of the booth, the voices of people walking past, the sounds of interaction with the phone, and the occasional wrong-number-constantly-ringing-phone. This project is not just an aesthetic change of the landscape. It will also bring a change in the way people move, interact, think about, and engage with this location. Taking these things into consideration will help to inform the self-reflexive accounts gathered from the participants on what their experience and thoughts are from using the payphone themselves.

Research Questions:

Question 1:

How does the reintroduction of a fully functioning payphone into a modern public space such as the quad on the Rutgers – Camden campus influence the perception of the payphone as a cultural artefact, historical artefact, and their interactions within (and perception of) the location?

This question focuses on how people will react to the installation of a payphone in an environment where it is not a normal part of the landscape. My goal is for the installation to inspire curiosity in the students, staff, and faculty of the school as well as members of the neighborhood surrounding the campus as the news of the payphone travels. Through this curiosity, it is my further hope that there will be many participants who decide to approach the booth and use the phone within it. In doing this, they will answer the initial question of how the people will respond.

Question 2:

What insight might be reflexively gained by the researcher(s) as they participate in the use of the phonebooth themselves?

This reflexive narrative will help form the base of the data collected based on the ideas from Fickers and Van den Oever, “Studying the sensorial properties of such a device adds a pivotal dimension to the study of these objects in use, a perceptual, sensorial and experimental dimension, which we assume has a particular relevance for the study of media” (Fickers van den Oever 4). As well as later in their book, “… forms of hands-on experimentation which support a self-reflexive approach to historical knowledge … emphasising the need for critical reflection” (Fickers van den Oever 118). Encouraging more researcher-level participants to join this project will expand the amount of data that might be gathered from this step and broaden the scope of the responses by giving a larger sampling of data from participants who know more about the background of the installation and the goals of the experience as a whole.

Participants who are not aware of the experiment at the time of their participation will offer a decidedly less biased view of the experience as they will not be approaching it with the goal of attaining data. Their opinions will be codified and taken into consideration without the necessity of being considered for reflexivity and research bias. A researcher may be prone to concern as spoken of by Fickers and Van den Oever on page 119 there they speak about ‘imaginative speculations’ and how ‘inaccurate’ the phonebooth may feel from an authentic historical replication. “The mindful and sensorial engagement with past media technologies that we promote … in full awareness that the reproducibility of that past itself is by definition beyond recovery” (Fickers van den Oever 119).

Question 3:

How might the experimentation of this project create a change within the “medium” space of the quad, within the way participants and non-participants interact with the space, with the use of the object itself, and with the way the populations within the space interact with one another?

One of the interesting things from Keller Easterling that drives this question is an idea that comes up multiple times in Medium Design, including the statement on page 12, “The new technology … must replace the obsolete technology to create the one and only new platform” (Easterling 12). Yet, as is the case in many situations, the old technology heavily informs and influences the newer technologies. The layout of the keys on our cellphones is reflective of the keys on a phone and opposite of those on a keyboard’s number pad because it is shaped by the obsolete technology it replaced based on the research done in the 1950s that determined the phone should be different from the data-entry heavily used ‘calculator’ number pad (“Why Is the Keypad Arrangement Different for a Telephone and a Calculator?”).

The lack of awareness in modern society for the infrastructure that our world is built on is challenged by projects like this one, which bring back into focus that underlying technology and the advances that have allowed us to have the technology that we have now. This challenge is a benefit for society as a whole because it helps drive the thoughts, ideas, solutions, and technology forward from a place of deeper understanding for the importance of infrastructure. When considering the time it took to build the infrastructure of the phone lines and telecommunications as a whole it is easier to understand why the “explosion” of the payphone was so remarkable as it grew from 1 in the 1880s to 2.6million by 1995 (“Pubic Telephones”). It can also help inform the audience and participants on why the massive decline in payphones was remarkable as it took a nosedive from 2.6million down to under 100,000 in just over a decade (Bartell 2017). These considerations for the infrastructure and previous technologies are also informed by Easterling, “it asks readers to look with half-closed eyes at the world, focusing not only on objects … but also on the matrix or medium … those objects generate. … beyond object to matrix. … beyond nominative expressions to infinitive expressions of activity and interplay” (Easterling 11). It is with these things in mind that this question will focus on the environment as a medium and how the experiment alters participant interaction with that medium.

Genesis of Research Question:

My interest in payphones sparked during the Spring 2024 semester as I completed my Digital Studies major. I’ve always felt a sense of nostalgia for the aging payphone technology, especially as I’ve witnessed their steep decline over the years – what was once the most important communication tool in my life is now a rarity instead of a staple. That interest was nurtured as I researched the disappearance of this technology that used to be part of the general communication world infrastructure for my capstone film essay.

One of the humble steps in the development of worldwide telecommunications, the payphone was once a major part of just about any given community’s landscape. There was the half-booth, curved to encourage some level of privacy and sound quality; the full booth, adding in additional sound quality and privacy; and the fully enclosed booth, a haven in a busy location that could allow someone to ‘reach out and touch someone’ (Bell Systems ‘Reach Out and Touch Someone’ Commercial April 2, 1979), or in the case of superheroes, a place to change. Some of the slogans used by phone companies (e.g. ‘reach out and touch someone’) and their adjacent support companies (e.g. yellow pages) were so profound they’re still rattling around in the back of the minds of people who were alive before the proliferation of cellular devices, like “let your fingers do the walking” which was a major advertising slogan for the yellow pages back in the 1970’s (Admin, 2012). In today’s busy world, the payphone has been on the endangered list since the 1990s after the peak in 1995 where 2.6 million payphones were in operation (“Public Phones” 2009). The growth of payphones was constant through the 1900s, starting with an estimated 81,000 in operation in 1902 which skyrocketed up to the 2.6 million seen in 1995 (Grundstrom, 2024).

The growth from 1880 to 1902 – going from 1 to 81,000 – is nothing short of amazing considering that there were still places in which landlines hadn’t even been run yet (ETHW 2019). The first phone lines were run in 1877-1878, so this was still an incredibly young technology at the time payphones were brought into consideration (ETHW 2019). In fact as late as the 1950s, only around two-thirds of the households in America even had a phone, and those were rented from the telephone companies (Butler, 2021). To me, it is amazing that in just over a century an entire network was designed, built, and became the norm in countries around the world, only for the move to wireless and digital to topple the entire technology into obsolescence driving the massive removal of millions of payphones to the point that we have less in operation now than we did in 1902 (Morgado, 2024).

As I’ve worked on this project, putting more thought into it, and watching it evolve there are many pieces that have changed. What started as an aggressive message about payphones, public art, the digital divide, and the needs of low-income neighborhoods has morphed into a genuine curiosity about what people would do if given public space to just explore the payphone. Let them figure out how it works, what it feels like to use, and see it as a new and interesting curiosity instead of just a broken-down relic of a bygone era. After reading sections of the Fickers and van den Oever book and “thinkering” with an old toy sans instructions, it seems obvious now that the final iteration of this project would focus more on getting people to interact with a working payphone as curious users than on using it as an artistic medium. It has become more about bringing awareness to the general public about what a payphone was, what it was built on, and how it impacted us as a society than about focusing on the abstract idea of it as an alternative communication device.

“If you build it, they will come” (Robinson, 1989).

Realistically, a payphone doesn’t sound very exciting. The experience of using it, though, is not always in line with the perception of what it will be. Using a phone used to be an uncommon thing for a kid, I can recall many fights over who could or couldn’t use the phone, the times it could be used, the places it could be used – and the humble payphone was a whole experience – for a handful of change found on the ground I could be the master of my own communication! It was the material construction of the booth, some having a shelf for a phone book which inevitably became a bench. It was the assumed privacy of the closed door, shutting out the rest of the world. It was the janky cord, the jammed coins and fighting the coin return, it was so many more things than “just using a phone” – beyond these, it was where groups of kids met up to coordinate their ‘plan of attack’ on the day, it was faked calls from work, school, or just prank calls that couldn’t be traced back to a single person in a time where the harmless fun of “is your refrigerator running” calls frustrated society but brought playfulness to a vital technological platform.

When I say I’m researching payphones, people often give me a strange look followed by a wiggle of the cell phone they inevitably have and the single word: WHY?

I’m learning the answer to their why is a complex thing to consider. Because this is our history, one of the many foundational platforms we built our communication world on. Because the payphone wasn’t JUST a phone, it was the booth, the anonymity for some people, a line to the bigger world, a tool to seek aid ~ as much as it is about the community aspects it connected, there is so much more to the phone than just the booth. This project seeks to bring back that experience and innate knowledge. This project wants to highlight the way we carried the most important phone numbers in our heads so we could easily contact those people and why that vital pecking order has gone the way of the dodo; after all, why memorize a number when they’re all saved in your phone? Our behaviors as a society have shifted dramatically since the inception of the cell phone, even more so since the monumental shift from landlines to a nearly cell-only world. This can clearly be seen in the way people scramble to remember a phone number of any level of importance and thinking back (as those my age can do) to a time when our phone numbers were drilled into our heads in kindergarten so we could call home in an emergency. (On a payphone!)

Literature Review:

Fickers & van den Oever – Doing Experimental Media Archaeology

One reason we seek a physical engagement with these historical artefacts is to stimulate our imagination of the past: to reflect critically on the hidden or non-verbalised, sensorial, corporal, and tacit knowledge that informs our engagement with media technologies. (42)
Instead of concentrating on production and invention narratives, technology historiography has focused increasingly on the processes of social construction, social appropriation or rejection, and on the symbolic significance of technology and technological artefacts. (43)
Studying the sensorial properties of such a device adds a pivotal dimension to the study of these objects in use, a perceptual, sensorial and experiential dimension, which we assume has a particular relevance for the study of media.(4)
It seems to us though that the smartphone has affected our relation to media technologies in major ways and that today’s public has had a closer, more intimate and also much more physical relationship with technological devices since its emergence. Almost overnight, it seems to have become the emblematic “new medium” of the twenty-first century. Being designed to be worn on the body, light and smooth and mobile and exactly the size of the hand, it is a recording and display device for sound and images, still and moving, and, moreover, an archiving and storing device, a dissemination and communication device, and all this at once. We must ask ourselves whether this device did not silently, overnight, become the new model for thinking about both media and technology at the same time. (7)
As with so many of these optical devices from this era, the thaumatrope is intended for hands-on use, only giving away its secrets when properly operated. In Gunning’s words, the “composite image produced by the thaumatrope is perceived only when the device is properly in motion. Once the device ceases to operate, we experience the rupture between the previous perception and the now-inert device; instead of a fused image, the bird and cage now separate into independent images”. (8-9)
It is a prerogative of collections such as the ones we use in research and teaching that they allow for a Wunderkammer-like invitation to see, feel, touch, and handle the objects, many of which are themselves made to stir a useful sense of wonder in students and researchers alike. (10)
The way to address these questions has been foremost throughout: to think while handling these objects; to address the questions which emerge from or during (everyday) media use in research and teaching. Media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo has introduced the term thinkering for this method of “thinking while doing”. (10-11)
As opposed to these practices, we propose forms of hands-on experimentation which support a self-reflexive approach to historical knowledge production and highlight the contemporary situatedness of the historian-experimenter. If anything, the experimental practices we propose aim at emphasising the need for critical reflection on the concepts of historical authenticity, accuracy, experience, and imagination. (118)
The mindful and sensorial engagement with past media technologies that we promote is rather meant to provoke “imaginative speculations” about how things might have looked, or felt, or sounded like in the past – in the full awareness that the reproducibility of that past itself is by definition beyond recovery. (119)
Moreover, the careful documentation and self-reflexive analysis of such an experimental practice will be greatly beneficial for the fields of media archaeology, media history, and material and museum studies. (69)
One possible way of exploring past media practices is to do re-enactments or hands-on experiments with old media devices, as we have been envisioning since 2013. At the heart of it is our plea to open the vaults and glass cases of museums: to make the device collections available to researchers for experiments, hands-on. A second goal of experimental media archaeology is to sensitise researchers to the sensorial and experiential dimension of media use. A third goal is to reach beyond sensitization effects and to “grasp” media and communication technologies in their concrete materiality and tangibility, a hermeneutical act in Cassirer’s sense, involving the intellectual process of comprehending, as well as the sensory-bodily appropriation of getting a grip on things. (68-69)
We wish to emphasise once again that doing experiments with past media technologies – be it with originals or replicas – produces authentic contemporary experiences, but these (lab) experiences can, in no way, recreate “authentic” historical experiences. As one of the pioneers of sensory history, Mark Smith, has convincingly argued, we need to carefully distinguish between sensory production and consumption. (69)
Re-enactments and experimental approaches open up possibilities that allow history to be understood as unfinished business. (70)
Building replicas, taking precious devices from their glass cases, and experimenting with originals, we argue, will help to dehabituate media historians from their fixation on media newness and authenticity. It might produce creative distortions in a field dominated by canonical narratives of technological inventions and innovations, and refocus on cascades of media use (rather than technical newness). And, lastly, it might dehabituate historians from the standard media histories and value the surprisingly capricious and quirky (de)habituation histories so typical of the experiences of past media practices. (73)
In the previous chapters, we outlined the theoretical framework of experimental media archaeology and argued that doing this kind of hands-on media history has the potential to offer a fresh look at past media technologies and objects in action. Based on the user-typology outlined in our “Plea for new directions”, we assume that experimental media archaeology adds a new interpretative layer in the complex historical study of past media practices. (74)
A third and last category of experiments is so-called “performative experiments”:
- Performative experiments are an examination of historical media performances through reenactments, public presentations and demonstrations. Here the focus is on the interaction between the object, user, location and a modern audience or participants. The performance or live action, in its entirety, becomes the epistemic object under scrutiny. (76)
While basic experiments – for example, testing the brightness of different light sources (candles, oil, gas, electric bulbs) for a specific type of Laterna Magica – do require a specific environment respecting safety and/or noise protection measures, performative experiments – such as the live re-enactment of a film projection with a Pathé Baby projector or an open-air concert with a pneumatically amplified gramophone – ask for a careful mise-en-scène of a 1920s living room, and the orchestration of a public space (e.g., the use of a rotunda in a park) respectively. (77)
Simulation: a systematic reconstruction that focuses on simulating the user-object relationship and the retrieval of tacit knowledge involved. The aim of experimentation is principally demonstrative: the functioning of the media historical object and its use are demonstrated through their physical and/or digital simulations. (78)
– Re-enactment: where there are no surviving practitioners taking part, a reenactment attempts, as far as possible, to recreate historical practices, and examines the workings and outcomes of the technological object in action. Unlike the methods of thinkering or simulation, the nature of re-enactment is performative: the media historical object and its usage are staged for and in front of an audience. (78)
– Replication: where an historical object may not be used or is unavailable, it can be substituted with a replica. As a research method, the construction of a replica provides insights into the resilience of the epistemic object under scrutiny. The modus of experimentation is educational, emphasising the role of failure, resistance and learning by doing. (78)
Before planning and doing an experiment in media archaeology, it is therefore important to think carefully about the envisioned mode or epistemological ambition of the hands-on history activity. We have sufficient evidence from a variety of hands-on approaches in history235 that this specific practice of doing history is likely to change our relationship with the past – both intellectually and sensorially. Reflecting on the experimental setting and purpose of any experiment engaging with past media objects, technologies, or practices, before getting our minds and bodies to connect with past remains, is therefore a methodological necessity. (78)
Media archaeology positively helped to constitute the field of media studies and contributed considerably to the broader awareness of how important media are and have been in the past. (18)
In engaging with historical artefacts, we aim at stimulating our sensorial appropriation of the past and thereby critically reflecting the hidden and non-verbalized knowledge that informs our engagement with media technologies (in the rest of our book we will speak of tacit knowledge). In doing experimental media archaeology, we want to plead for a hands-on, ears-open, or integral sensual approach toward media technologies. (19-20)
We believe that doing historical re-enactments with old media artefacts is a heuristic approach that will offer new sensorial experiences and reflexive insights into the complex meanings and functionalities of past media technologies and practices. It aims at going beyond the “hermeneutics of astonishment” of media archaeology65 by turning “observers” into “experimenters”. (23)
In creating a space for creative exploration and tinkering with either original artefacts or replicas, the researcher will get a first-hand experience of the heuristic difference between studying textual and visual representations of past media technologies and their performative qualities and limitations in real-life interaction and re-use. (23)
Putting our hands on past media technologies will hopefully create new forms of collaborations between archives, museums, media artists, and media scholars. Moreover, it may help to close the epistemological gap in the research of media that has been left by the explanatory models which assume media to be “transparent”. (25)
One can actually observe a kind of melancholic retrospection of our analog past. This melancholic retrospection might on the one hand be the result of a generation gap or tension between the “analog born” and “digital born”. On the other hand, it might be the product of a tension between the loss or stealthy disappearance of the material evidence of analog technologies in our daily lives, and the massive resurrection of “analog-born products” in digital technologies and the Internet. While the generation gap between analog and digital is basically a demographic and therefore a temporally delimited problem, the stealthy disappearance of material evidence of analog technologies constitutes a specific challenge for cultural heritage institutions such as museums and film and media archives.71 As media scholars we should make sure that the material traces of these artefacts will not disappear from the digital radar of media scholars. (25)
As media historians, media archaeologists, or media scholars in general, we need the material traces of analog and digital memory technologies not only as physical “witnesses” or “proof” of a period gone by, but as objects that can enlighten and educate our own analytical skills when it comes to the study of past usages of media technologies. (26)

**Keller Easterling – Medium Design – citations by PDF page number**

Favoring nominative or quantitative expressions over expressions of disposition, culture privileges what philosopher Gilbert Ryle called the difference between “knowing that” and “knowing how”—something like the difference between knowing the right answer and exercising experienced reactions unfolding over time. (11)
It asks readers to look with half-closed eyes at the world, focusing not only on objects with names, shapes, and outlines, but also on the matrix or medium of activities and latent potentials that those objects generate. It looks beyond object to matrix. It looks beyond nominative expressions to infinitive expressions of activity and interplay. And it looks beyond declared ideologies to undeclared dispositions—beyond the authority of economic or political labels that often obscure or misrepresent latent potentials in organizations of all kinds. (11)
By looking at space as a medium, it is in dialogue with all those—media theorists among them—who are returning to the Latin root of the word “medium,” medius. Not bound by associations with communication technologies, “medium” in this context means middle, or milieu. (12)
They must wipe away the incumbent. The new right answer must kill the old right answer, and the new elementary particle must now parse the world. The new technology—from railroads to digital communications—must replace the obsolete technology to create the one and only new platform.(12)
Conforming to default modernist scripts claiming that newer is better, technologies must be successive rather than coexistent. And, at a moment of digital ubiquity, “smart” attaches to emergent, presumably superior digital technologies. (65)
In perennial cycles of obsolescence and replacement, new infrastructure technologies have overwritten existing networks, no matter how sophisticated the incumbents may be. In a confounding paradox, when the modern “smart” discards or subsumes the previous technology for the new technology, it eliminates information in an attempt to be smarter. It is a closed loop establishing a new smart that, by definition, recreates the old dumb. Masquerading as more sophisticated, it returns to a more primitive disposition. (65)

Audience:

The intended audience for this work will focus on academic students and professors who are interested in media archeology. Another group might be some hobbyist tech fans, such as Mike Dank and his team at PhilTel, perhaps even Futel who does a similar project and inspired PhilTel (they’re on the west coast of the US), Talk To Me, or OIRCT – another similar collective, this one in France.

One place I would love to see this work written about or featured is howstuffworks.com, a major news outlet (hah!), small independent printers of news, University supported publications that feature student work – for the story of the who/what/why of the project, anyway.

Pie-in-the-sky answer? I’d love to see this project through to the end and write an academic paper about the entire thing and see it used as an example in a book like Media Archaeology edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka.

Material/Data:

The main material here is the environment, the people, the interactions with the object as it stands in place. This is inspired by Easterling’s words on page 11 of Media Design, “It looks beyond object to matrix. It looks beyond nominative expressions to infinitive expressions of activity and interplay. And it looks beyond declared ideologies to undeclared dispositions—beyond the authority of economic or political labels that often obscure or misrepresent latent potentials in organizations of all kinds” (Easterling, 11). The phone booth is the medium, the location it is in, the people who interact with it, the people who don’t interact with it, the way life changes patterns around the location, all of these things are part of the material and data that will be taken into consideration as part of this project.

Another type of data to take into consideration is the results of short interviews of participants. In addition to participants it might be interesting to interview other people who are interested in the payphone as a technology to see how this project impacts them as well as how they experience it themselves. This qualitative data would help paint a vibrant picture of how this technology impacts the modern “mobile communication” user and how it changes their perception of older technology and their own current use of modern technology.

Method:

Heavily reliant on the media archaeology method, this project is informed as well by medium design as defined by Keller Easterling. First, it is a dive into the obsolete technology of the landline phone, specifically a payphone and the booth it is housed within. However, it isn’t just the phone booth that is the medium for this project, which is where the medium design comes in – this will be a dive into the nostalgia that interaction with the phone may create and how this installation will impact the campus quad where it is installed. The reconstruction will be more than just the booth, however, as it will play heavily on the experience of using a phone booth, seeing it in “the wild,” and using it as a communication tool in a world where most communication is mobile. Each user will experience the authentic experience of the phonebooth the same way that it was experienced in the past visually and tactilely. In considering the use of the pay phone users will understand better the path that has been taken from having phones installed in remote locations that could be used for personal calls to having a phone they can carry on their person at all times. In this we will expose the closed loop model from Medium Design, “In perennial cycles of obsolescence and replacement, new infrastructure technologies have overwritten existing networks, no matter how sophisticated the incumbents may be. In a confounding paradox, when the modern “smart” discards or subsumes the previous technology for the new technology, it eliminates information in an attempt to be smarter. It is a closed loop establishing a new smart that, by definition, recreates the old dumb” (Easterling 65).

Furthermore, to expand on the ability to turn this project into a paper, the method of interviews would also be put into play so that qualitative data can be gathered, codified, and explored for the humanistic values such an experiment will incite in users. Observing as participants react to the phone booth, explore the booth, and use the phone will offer up a great deal of data as well. A QR code posted within the phone booth will lead to a website that offers historical information and artefacts to describe the rise and fall of the payphone, perhaps offering an interactive map of the infrastructure that would show a participant how their phone call would be routed through the old infrastructure as opposed to just being beamed around wirelessly as with modern technology. Within this website there will be an interview that will allow participants to give feedback on their interaction with the phone, their thoughts and ideas about the old infrastructure, and a call to action to consider the importance of the landline telecommunications network as a whole and how it informed the development of modern telecommunication technologies. I feel like adding in the interactive component will help to better inform the participants on why the booth is there, what the purpose is of installing obsolete technology on campus, and why exploring these type of technologies can be important in the modern world.

Medium/Form:

The medium for this project is the entire location for the phonebooth, which would ideally be the Rutgers-Camden “quad” near the Campus Center or Fine Arts building. Included in the medium would be the physical booth, the pay phone, the technological framework that makes the phone work, the infrastructure of telecommunications, the students, staff, and faculty of Rutgers-Camden, the random residents who walk through the area, the pathing changes created by the installation, the use of the phone by these people – or the avoidance of use – as they explore the booth and phone, and the relationship between participants and their own mobile communication devices.

The form of this project is a phenomenological experiment and ethnographic study of the reactions participants have to the phone booth. Documenting the reactions and interactions participants have with the phone and booth as well as asking them how the experience impacts them and their perception of modern communication technologies will result in rich data sets that will (hopefully) inform on the changes in technology, the experience of “thinkering” with old technology, and how the landscape of modern communities has morphed since this technology was a major part of the social norm.

Expected findings, conclusions, and/or results:

While I do not know what the conclusions or results might be from this project, I would like to think that it would be a very informative and enlightening experience for the participants and passive participants. Seeing a payphone in general is a novelty in today’s society. The few that I have found are in sketchy places, near mass transit, and often filthy and barely working. Installation of a “new” or decently conditioned phone booth would definitely draw attention. Seeing them may be a rarity, but seeing a “new” one being installed would generate some level of buzz. Anything that is outside of the ordinary will draw people in to look, and when looking at a phone booth I know people are likely to pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone.

I firmly believe the “weird” charm of a phone booth will be more than enough to draw people in. Having a live dial tone will invite participants to use the phone. Using the phone will put them in the phenomenological position of experiencing something that was a common occurrence as little as 20 years ago. Yet even though this is a recent historical phenomenon, it is something that the traditional college freshman would not have necessarily experienced in their lives since the payphone was in decline as they were being born, and by the time they were old enough to use phones they would’ve had access to a mobile device.

One of the most interesting findings this study could produce would be to answer just how far curiosity will take a person when exploring a public tool like a payphone that is so unusual in today’s society that it would be considered an oddity. How many people will do more than glance? How many people will pick up the receiver? How many will attempt to make a call? How many will return? While not all of these questions will be easy to monitor, there are some that may be explored with data collection to some extent.

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