Month: August 2022

Tracing themes in our digital map

Posted on August 25, 2022 by - Uncategorised

As we look back on a year of submissions to the Telephonic Youth digital map, in this post we identify key themes in the memories that are now published on our map.* A thematic analysis of the memories which have been shared with us reveals some interesting factors in the way that people articulate their memories of using the telephone. It also provides an insight into how memories shared by individuals relate to the wider history of childhood, history of youth culture, the history of the family and history of technology in the late twentieth century.

Technologies

In articulating their memories, 47 per cent of contributors specifically engaged with the telephone as a piece of technology. Submissions often reference distinct factors relating to its changing form and function during our time period. One contributor, for example, noted:

The phone was on a cord (no cordless in those days). In later years I remember sitting for ages on the stairs talking to school friends on the phone planning the latest shopping trip or junior nightlife activity for teens! […] The day we went cordless was a momentous one with much excitement.

(Clare Court, Loughor, Swansea, 1990s)

This technological change was significant as it continually reshaped how, where, when, and why children and adolescents used the telephone, reshaping youth culture and youth leisure in the process.

Submissions shared by contributors suggest the process of adapting to new technologies—whether this is understood as being new to the user, such as a cordless phone, or a relatively new innovation like mobile phones—was understood often to be a significant ‘moment’.[1] However, as many as 10 per cent also remembered being taught to use long-established telephonic devices.[2]

One especially important experience in two contributors’ childhoods was learning to use a telephone kiosk (phone box) in Brownies, a section of the Girl Guides for girls aged between 7 and 10.[3] As one former Southampton-based Brownie recalled:

[Brown Owl] taught us to how to use a public phone as part of a Brownie Badge. I remember waiting anxiously for my turn rubbing my coins together (two big 5 pences I think), would I remember all the instructions? Snowy Owl was back in the Church Hall answering all our calls!

(Water Lane, Totton, Southampton, 1984)

The Cub Scouts also taught their members to use the telephone as part of various badges but we received no memories of this, despite efforts to engage the Scout Association and its followers on social media. Given the small sample size of our dataset (61 memories submitted at the time of this analysis), it would be difficult to draw firm conclusions about the relative significance of telephony training to Girl Guides and (what was then called) Boy Scouts, though it seems clear that the experience of learning to use a phone box in Brownies was of such significance that it was recalled decades later.

Safety

There were many reasons that children and young people were taught to use telephone kiosks in organisations such as Brownies and Cubs. For most of the twentieth century, they were the most accessible means of making a telephone call either because people did not have phones in their own homes, or because they were away from their fixed landlines. However, public payphones were also crucial for what we might define as personal safety, with memories on this theme recorded in 21 per cent of submissions.

One contributor, for example, submitted a general recollection of using the payphone to keep in touch with parents:

I remember using telephone boxes, these were used to tell my parents what time I’d be home. You could do a return call where you would be connected to the other line. Just before you were connected, the operator would say to your parent, you have a call from…would you like me to connect you.

(Lewisham, London 1994)

For another contributor, the phone box itself became a physical refuge from a dangerous animal:

I was on my way home from school, when I got chased by [a] German Shepherd. I hid in a red phonebox and phoned the operator, asking them to reverse charges and call home. I spoke to my mum who sent my uncle to come and rescue me. I waited in the phone box til he arrived, I’ve been scared of German Shepherds ever since.

(Boundary Way, Havant, 1995)

Access

By far the most widely mentioned theme, occurring in 59 per cent of the memories we received, was access. Ownership of a telephone is a key issue here. Across our time period, although the number of households with a landline steadily increased, some did not have a landline.[4] Access is defined broadly also to include factors such as having to share the telephone with other family members or neighbours, and billpayers attempting to restrict the amount of time (and money) spent on the phone.

Underpinning the question of access, and often linked to it, was the issue of money. 47 per cent of submissions mentioned money as a factor in their childhood or adolescent telephone use. Some recalled the requirement to take spare change in case of an emergency and the noted ability to reverse charges as a way to avoid having to pay. For others, finances were a concern for parents trying to reduce or control telephone bills. Submissions to our map show that this was a financial issue of which children and young people were aware acutely, either because their parents made them contribute to the costs of the bill, or because their own subversive use of the telephone was exposed upon receipt of a bill.[5] There are many conclusions to be drawn about the significance of money in shaping children and young people’s telephone use. Certainly their awareness of the financial implications provides an insight into the way young people understood their position within the domestic economy and the decisions they might take to participate within telephone cultures —whether calling friends, or, in the 2000s, voting for participants on reality television programmes.

Play

The submissions we have received so far suggest the use of the telephone in what we might define broadly as ‘play’ or recreation was becoming increasingly important in our period of interest. The theme of ‘play’ was present in 29 per cent of submissions, the majority of which were memories dating from the 1990s and 2000s. While, especially from the 2000s, many of the submissions referred to phone-based games, such as ‘Snake’ (first featured on the Nokia 6110), earlier memories point to playful or creative uses of telephones.[6] For example, one story of siblings recalled humorously responding to cold callers in the late 1990s:

As young teens at the end of the 90s/early 00s, my sister and I often used to answer calls from marketing firms asking for our mother. We always said she had run off with the window cleaner & not to call again as we were v upset.

(Conkell, Winsley, Bradford-on-Avon, BA15 2JF, c.1999)

What might this tell us?

In our previous blog we noted that as engaged researchers we need to be attuned to the implications of our research practice and the ways in which public engagement as a research method might have shaped the kinds of memories we have received. Nevertheless, the striking overlap in the themes which people have shared can tell us much about the key reasons why children and young people used the telephone in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain. There are notable continuities with earlier periods in some cases, whilst also the novelty of the new. The submissions also provide a useful insight into the cultures which children and young people created as conscious consumers and users of telephones. Memories from some contributors link to the idea of ‘children’s worlds’, but others point to how children and adolescents negotiated spaces shared with adults. Our third blog post in the series will explore this topic further by thinking about the importance of place in the telephone memories we have received.

 

* The analysis in this blog post is linked to the data collected in submissions to the Telephonic Youth Digital Map during the first year of data collection. Following the completion of the research project and the period that the website remains publicly available, the dataset will be deposited and made accessible through a repository, in accordance with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) / UKRI policies.

[1] For discussion of cordless telephony as part of the development of the idea of ‘personal communications’, see John Gardiner and Wally Tuttlebee, ‘The Future of Personal Communications’, in W. H. W. Tuttlebee, Cordless Telecommunications in Europe: the Evolution of Personal Communications (London; New York, 1990), pp. 223-250. On the history of the mobile phone, see Jon Agar, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (Cambridge: 2004).

[2] This finding fits with Sonia Livingstone’s argument that new media supplement rather than replace old media and ‘new forms of media transform or are transformed by patterns of use surrounding older forms of media’: Sonia Livingstone, Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment (London: 2003), p. 15.

[3] The junior section of the Guide Association was officially recognised in 1914 (first known as Rosebuds, then Brownies), and by 1920 the age range of the Brownie section was fixed as under 11 years:  Tammy Proctor, Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Scouts (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2009), p. 37.

[4] The percentage of UK private households with a fixed-line telephone increased from 50% in 1974 to 78% in 1984, to 91% in 1994 and 92% in 2004. Statistics taken from: The General Household Survey 1974 (London, 1977), p. 83; General Household Survey 1984 (London, 1986), p. 63; Living in Britain: Results from the 1994 General Household Survey (London, 1996), p. 26; General Household Survey: Results for 2004 (London, 2006), p. 178.

[5] BT trialled itemised telephone billing in some areas of the UK as early as 1983. See ‘BT’s Innovation Timeline’ <https://shop.bt.com/mini-sites/techinnovation> [last accessed 25 August 2022].

[6] Nokia introduced the game of Snake into the Nokia 6110 in 1997. See Nigel Linge and Andy Sutton, 30 Years of Mobile Phones in the UK (Stroud, 2015), p.33.

 

Main image: Word cloud showing the most common words used in written memories submitted to the Telephonic Youth Digital Map in its first year.

Digital mapping one year in: our research methods; or what we did

Posted on August 16, 2022 by - Uncategorised

In August 2021, the Telephonic Youth team began to collect memories through our social media channels and at in-person public events in Southampton. Over the next twelve months, dozens of people came forward to share their stories, most of which are available on our digital map. Our aim was to uncover aspects of the largely ‘untold’ history of children and young people’s telephone use and telephone cultures in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

This research is still ongoing—if you haven’t already, please do share your memories. But, one year in, we want to think about some of the things that the memories we’ve received so far might tell us about the history of children and young people’s telephone use and the wider histories of childhood and youth. Our digital mapping work is part of the engaged research strand on our project, and we are also reflecting on the practice of engaged research.[1] In this post, we will briefly outline the methodology we have adopted in this part of our research by explaining what we did and why. In two follow-up posts, we will examine some of the key themes discussed in many of the submissions to our map, and the spaces and places in which children and young people used the telephone.

In order to better understand the stories we have gathered, it is important to begin with how we collected them. Well before the August 2021 launch, Dr Eve Colpus worked with a web development team at boxChilli to design our website and the University of Southampton Research Ethics and Research Integrity and Governance teams to ensure that appropriate guidelines, participant choices and data storage mechanisms were in place (ERGO 56966). This allowed us to collect memories through the website and publicise this using our social media channels. After the launch of the website, we began to collect stories and started the process to gain University research ethics approvals also to collect data using social media (which was approved in ERGO 67005).

Image of a white woman with medium length brown hair using a laptop to visit telephonicyouth.co.uk.

A participant submitting a memory to Telephonic Youth’s digital map at the University of Southampton’s Hands-on Humanities Day, November 2021.

Our online and in-person memory-collection has taken place alongside more established forms of historical research, notably archival research in collections including those of our partner BT Group Archives, and oral history interviews. Clips from these interviews have formed part of our exhibition at K6 Gallery in Southampton, with others soon to be available on this site. Archival and oral history research will help us to contextualise the memories we have received through our digital mapping research. This is especially important as many of the submissions to our map are, to a certain extent, decontextualised. We do not know any more details about our contributors’ lives beyond that which they chose to share with us. Although we are aware of instances where contributors shared more than one memory, the great majority submitted one. As a result, our mapping gives us a fascinating series of snapshots into people’s experiences and memories of growing up.

Of the 61 published memories which were submitted through our website —there were more which, for various reasons, we have not been able to publish on the map at the time of writing—30 of them came through our online engagement. The remaining 31 came through a series of in-person events in Southampton, including Hands-on Humanities Day, Science and Engineering Day, and pop-up stalls at local libraries across the city. Of the memories published on our digital map, 58 have been included in our analysis owing to the permissions granted by the contributors. Publishing people’s memories on a map has enabled them to be accessible and interactive, but as we explain in a follow-up post, also provides an insight into the way that geography might shape people’s experiences of growing up, as told through their memories of using the telephone.

Throughout our online and in-person public engagement work we have endeavoured to be led by the individual contributor, using as few prompts as possible to ensure that the memories we collected were those which our respondents most wanted to share at that moment in time. There have, of course, been exceptions to this, especially in the way that our social media engagement has been framed. The nature of social media-based engagement, for example, requires closer attention to themed posts during events such as LGBT+ History Month, Black History Month, and Disability History Month, or relating to specific materials we have collected in the archives. Nevertheless, these have been our guiding principles and will form the basis of our practice and thinking as we go forward.

The memories we have received may also have been affected by the other stories already published on our digital map. Rather than extracting knowledge from people, we have looked to create a community of contributors through our social media channels and by encouraging people to read other people’s memories on our website. On social media, we have frequently shared screenshots of published memories (with permission from the contributor) to publicise the project, share our findings, and encourage additional submissions. As engaged researchers, we are acutely aware that some people may have been guided in their submissions by having first read other people’s memories.

Officially, our period of research dates from 1984 to 1999, encompassing the economic and cultural shifts of the marketization of UK telecommunications and the growth of the global mobile phone market, which, by the end of the 1990s, was targeting young people as phone owners in their own right. However, in our digital mapping research, people have shared memories dating from the mid-1970s up to c.2020. That we received six memories from the 1970s, and an additional one dated ‘1975-1985’, undoubtedly confirms the significance of these particular memories to the contributors. It also shows the agency that members of the public have in this research in sharing their own stories on their own terms, and the requirement that engaged researchers work to shape their research practice in order to honour that engagement where possible. Our follow-up blogs will explain further how we have sought to do this and examine what the memories of telephone use we’ve received so far might tell us about the experience of growing up in Britain from the mid-1970s to the present.

[1] On engaged research in the discipline of History, see e.g. Jennifer Crane, ‘The NHS … Should not be Condemned to the History Books’: Public Engagement as a Method in Social Histories of Medicine’, Social History of Medicine, 34, 3 (2021), pp. 1005-27; Laura King and Gary Rivett, ‘Engaging People in Making History: Impact, Public Engagement and the World Beyond the Campus’, History Workshop Journal, 80, 1 (2015), pp.218–233.

 

Main image: Screenshot of the map from telephonicyouth.co.uk/digital-mapping/ (as of 15 August 2022). The map shows the UK and Ireland (plus part of France and Belgium). The set of icons (red rotary telephones) indicate the locations of memories that have been submitted.