Month: April 2022

Throughout March and April, our friends at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery have been running their 2022 Community Takeover events. Exploring the themes of environment, sustainability and wellbeing, the Gallery has worked with schools, local charities, artists, community leaders, and us to explore big questions about how we can help our planet and health.

The Telephonic Youth team was very excited to be part of Community Takeover on the first day of its programme. Joined by two History undergraduate students from the University of Southampton, we set up an activity in the Gallery  to turn old phones into community art. Where phones have become disposable items for many, we encouraged people to remember the stories that are attached to our old phones, and to think in different ways about how phone use and production impacts the environment.

We invited people to create an archive tag for one of their old phones. The tags asked people to describe an object, add the date of their memory and a description. The names people gave to their old phones pointed to intimate and personal connections that people have with their phones: ‘My old nokia’, ‘First telephone ever’, ‘The phone under the stairs’. Data left behind on sim cards were a reminder that phones themselves are made of many objects and are themselves miniature archives, holding memories of their owners’ everyday lives. As people stuck their archive tags onto a large 1980s map of Southampton and an even larger map of the world (on loan to the project), the community artwork began to take shape.

Professor Ian Williams, from the University of Southampton’s Engineering Faculty, also joined us on the day and spoke to people about e-waste. We learned about the amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that are caused during the manufacture of a digital device, but also what we can do to try to reduce the impact of e-waste. For example, if you keep your smartphone for 5 instead of 2 years, you can halve its carbon dioxide and water impacts. Community Takeover provided an opportunity to make a very small contribution to reducing e-waste, as some people also left behind old, unused mobile phones to be recycled or re-used.

The archive tags created during Community Takeover told stories about phone boxes and old landline phones, but memories about mobile phones featured prominently.  We shouldn’t be surprised at this: the heritage of mobile phones is now explored in dedicated museums, such as the Mobile Phone Museum. As mobile phones become museum exhibitions, consumers increasingly turn back to ‘dumb phones’, and the climate crisis and resource finiteness threaten consumer habits, there has never been a more important time to re-think the mobile phone’s past, present, and future.

Featured image by Nosa Malcolm.

The Telephonic Youth team have been spending a lot of time in libraries recently—though we weren’t there to borrow books (even if there were more than a few which caught our eye!)

The team at Southampton City Council Libraries kindly allowed us to stage a series of pop-ups across Southampton throughout February and March. It was a bit bumpy—and we had to re-schedule our last one because of covid—but it was also an enriching experience. In the process, we’ve added more stories to our interactive map. We’ve also learned a lot about how we can and should work in public spaces to gather memories (we spoke about this recently at the Institute of Historical Research’s Britain at Home and Abroad seminar). So, what did we learn?

Librarians are your best friends. We already knew this, but it was good to have it reinforced. At all of the libraries we visited, the librarians were there to offer us support, advice, and cups of tea. They directed visitors to our pop-up and even shared their own memories.

Local stories are also global stories. We talked a lot about this in our seminar paper, but visiting libraries across Southampton once again showed the diversity of the city. It was really striking how similar the memories people shared of growing up in Southampton were to those of growing up in other countries—the telephone is definitely something which can unite us all!

The best laid plans of mice and [historians] often go awry. Expect the unexpected is easier said than done, but it was especially true of our pop-ups. We began this research project during a pandemic, and even as restrictions have eased and we were finally able to go out and meet people (masked) in person, covid is still with us and so we’re especially grateful to the library teams for allowing us to reschedule when needed.

More than anything, we were reminded that public libraries are really important spaces which need to be available. Not just to loan out books, DVDs, board games, and puzzles, but also to provide a place for people to meet for a chat, to study, take part in family-friendly activities, or just spend the day learning about people’s experiences of growing up and using the phone in the 1980s and 1990s.

Do you remember using the phone when you were growing up? Share your memories here!