Month: October 2021

Here at Telephonic Youth, we’re looking to collect as many memories as we can about young people’s telephone use in 1980s and 90s Britain. We’re now collecting memories on our Twitter and Instagram accounts, and we’d love it if you shared your story with us.

If you post a memory on one of our social media sites, we’ll get in touch to ask if you’re happy for us to use your memory and save it as part of our research. We would also like to be able to quote your memory in our research outcomes, but we would only do this if you give us your permission.

We want to be clear about what data we would collect: as well as your memory, we’ll collect your username (but only if that is required by the social media platform) and the date and time of your message. We’ll also keep a record of your permission to use this data. All of your data will be held in accordance with data protection legislation and saved securely by the University of Southampton, and it will be accessed only by the research team and responsible members of the University of Southampton or individuals from regulatory authorities who may be given access to the data for monitoring purposes.

If you’d prefer us not to save your memory or quote from it, then we would only record the theme of your memory for our research, and we would not save your post or any of your details.

Taking part in this research is voluntary. If you do take part we hope you won’t experience any anxieties or concerns. However, if participating in this study raises any issues for you, we recommend that you contact one of the following resources: Childline (free phone number 0800 1111) or MIND (MIND Infoline is 0300 123 3393).

If you have contributed a memory to our research project on Twitter or Instagram, you can contact the research team on our social media platforms to ask to see the research outcomes. If you change your mind later and decide that you want to withdraw your post/memory from our research, you can also contact us on our social media platforms to let us know, and we will delete the data we had saved about your post from our research.

The Telephonic Youth Project is led by Dr Eve Colpus and based at the University of Southampton. The project has ethics approvals from the University of Southampton ERGO numbers 56966 and 67005. If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this research, or if you feel that you have been placed at risk, you may contact the Head of Research Integrity and Governance at the University of Southampton: rgoinfo@soton.ac.uk.

Data Protection Privacy Notice
The University of Southampton conducts research to the highest standards of research integrity. As a publicly-funded organisation, the University has to ensure that it is in the public interest when we use personally-identifiable information about people who have agreed to take part in research. This means that when you agree to take part in a research study, we will use information about you in the ways needed, and for the purposes specified, to conduct and complete the research project. Under data protection law, ‘Personal data’ means any information that relates to and is capable of identifying a living individual. The University’s data protection policy governing the use of personal data by the University can be found on its website (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/legalservices/what-we-do/data-protection-and-foi.page).

Our privacy notice for research participants provides more information on how the University of Southampton collects and uses your personal data when you take part in one of our research projects and can be found at http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/sharepoint/intranet/ls/Public/Research%20and%20Integrity%20Privacy%20Notice/Privacy%20Notice%20for%20Research%20Participants.pdf

If you have any questions about how your personal data is used, or wish to exercise any of your rights, please consult the University’s data protection webpage (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/legalservices/what-we-do/data-protection-and-foi.page) where you can make a request using our online form. If you need further assistance, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer (data.protection@soton.ac.uk).

If you’ve been following the project, you’ll know that we’re creating a map of people’s memories of using phones as children and teenagers from the 1980s onwards. So far, we’ve been sent some wonderful memories from across England which we’ll be uploading soon, but we’re especially interested in collecting stories from people who grew up in Southampton.

Why Southampton? The obvious answer is that it’s the city where we’re based, so we’re always eager to learn and share more about its history. I’m especially excited to learn about the city, having only joined the History Department at the University of Southampton as a Research Fellow in the Summer. But we also think that mapping Southampton’s phone spaces can tell us a lot about the history of other places.

Southampton is a provincial city. Though some may claim otherwise, Britain has no archetypal town or city which can be held up as representative of the entire country. But Southampton makes for a fascinating local case study—not too big, not too small, and not a capital city—through which we can examine the spatial history of young people’s telephone use in the home and in other places. How did growing up in the inner city compare to the suburbs? Or, taking the area surrounding the city into consideration, how did growing up in the city compare to nearby villages or towns? While each story shared with us will be individualised and special in its own right, mapping Southampton’s phone spaces can help us to better understand some similarities in people’s experiences, and how they might have changed over time.

Southampton is a diverse city. As a port city, Southampton has a long history of migration. We hope that the diversity of the city will be reflected in the diversity of the stories we are able to collect and therefore tell. And though Southampton ‘does not automatically evoke an association with the LGBT community’, as historian Sebastian Buckle argues, focusing on the local history allows us to explore in more depth the ways in which telephones could provide a means of connecting with communities beyond the city limits—potentially becoming a lifeline for gay men in the 1980s.

Southampton is a city with a lot going on. True, this can be said of many cities, but Southampton really does: exciting historical research into the history and heritage of hip hop; arts venues and galleries (including one in a re-purposed K6 Telephone Box!) which are helping us to reach out to communities; and a City of Culture bid. It truly is an exciting time to be working on and in Southampton. We have a lot of plans for the coming year—so watch this space (and follow us on Twitter and Instagram) to find out more.

In the meantime, you can help us to research this important and over-looked history of a bustling city by sharing your stories. If you live in or grew up in Southampton and the surrounding area from the 1980s onwards, please do share your memories with us. Become part of this previously untold history.