What’s lost when telephone calls disappear.: "The telephone’s rule was absolute until the mid-1980s, when the rising popularity of answering machines and caller ID began to undermine it. Baby boomers wielded these tools against their telephones like a lion tamer’s whip. If it was important, the caller could leave a message just as if they weren’t there, a deception their World War II generation parents could never countenance. The advent around the same time of call waiting similarly made human agency a deciding factor in whether you were available to talk. Sometime around 2010, my then-teenage daughter was trying to call a friend. Something’s wrong, she said. This phone has gone berserk. She handed it to me. I listened, then explained patiently what a busy signal was. She’d never heard one before.
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