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March 12, 2011
David Trotter in The Person in the Phone Booth in the London Review of Books says that:
Anyone old enough to have made use of public phone booths on a regular basis will know that they were more often than not damp, cold, filthy and foul-smelling, and while amply supplied with the phone numbers of prostitutes, practically impossible to make any sort of call from. So folk memory insists, at any rate. So literature insists too. Urban phone booths in particular have become indelibly associated in the literary imagination with urine.
The implication of the folk memory endlessly recycled in genre fiction, is that we don’t fully recognise a phone booth as a phone booth until we’ve felt just a little bit sick at the sight and smell of it. The disgust is the recognition.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, public phone box, Karamea, South Island, New Zealand
Evans says that in cities we used to enter phone boxes on the street in order to be private in public. That is, we once did, before we all had mobiles. Nowadays you don’t go somewhere special to make a call unless your mobile’s broken, or you’ve left it at home.
He adds that:
The new urban spectacle consists of people apparently in earnest conversation with themselves, whom we might once have crossed the road to avoid, or broadcasting the gory details of a personal fiasco to a train carriage full of strangers. It is in fact the prospect of the phone box’s complete supersession by the mobile which has most effectively laid bare its original purpose. For each of these mobile-users is engaged, as we once were when we stepped into a phone box, in constructing privacy in public.
The history of the urban phone box is the history of the construction of privacy in public.
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yes...so private even superman could change identity unrecognised. Seems funny now.
Superman now goes into space,alternate demensions and back and forward in time in cartoons. Its a big shift. I wonder if Dr Who will evolve one day from the quaint police box.