I'm so rich I got a landline, B

Wesleyan Sociology superhero, Sam Han, is just a couple years out of college, is teaching undergrad without an advanced degree, and just got his book, Navigating Technomedia, published with a foreword from famed theorist Charles Lemert.  

On his blog, Caught in the Web, he writes several McLuhan-y posts.  One in particular stands out.  Why?  Because it's all about him!  Look (and don't skip over the 2 youtube videos):

I’m so rich I got a landline, B.

August 8, 2008 by SH

Slate’s Daniel Gross gets into what is really killing the land-line telephone. And according to him, it’s not just the cell phone. Well of course it is the cell phone but there’s more to be said about the obsolescence of the the land line. He is speaking very specifically about residential land lines of course, which are close if not already dead media. “Dead media” is a term I learned from a 6-person seminar I took with two media scholars at NYU–Alex Galloway and Ben Kafka. (You can see some of the work that came out of that course here.) Dead media is exactly what it sounds like. Media that is no longer alive, no longer in use nor in the minds of most people. Betamax tapes, for instance, are dead media. But like human death, this is complicated. Sometimes media objects become resurrected by other media. One example is the original Nintendo, which has no been remediated in the Nintendo iPhone app, that allows you to play such classics as Contra and Bubble Bobble.

Watch the NES emulator app on the iPhone:

iPhone Nintendo Emulator

But back to the land-line telephone, is it dead quite yet? And if so, how dead is it?

In preparing for his article, Gross quite humorously does an impromptu survey of younger colleagues, to which the responses are quite hilarious.

… I was greeted with doleful, patronizing, silly-old-man smiles. The few who did have home phones used Skype. One had a phone at home that was part of a triple-play offering from the local cable company. “Nobody uses it.”

Haha. That’s probably exactly what happened. But it’s not just because everyone is using mobile phones. There’s another reason that Gross identifies–the economy. But to just say that the economic downturn that the US is experiencing is responsible for any and every decline in consumption. As Gross notes, the land-line has gone from necessity to luxury:

But in this first real slowdown of the wireless age, consumers seem to be saying that home-based telephones are expendable luxuries, like Starbucks lattes or Coach handbags. And it makes sense. Confronted with high inflation, soaring energy costs, and stagnant wages, millions of households are facing choices about which monthly bills to pay and which commitments to maintain. And if it comes down to one or the other, the mobile or the home-based land line, it’s clear which is a necessity and which is an option. One lets you make telephone calls only from your house. The other lets you make telephone calls from anywhere, send e-mails, surf the Internet, play music, and take photographs.

Couldn’t have put it any better. I think what most media critics fail to recognize is that the newest gadget won’t supplant unless a comfort threshold is met, by which the new technology is able to fulfill the function of the old technology and then some. This is what the Godfather of media theory Marshall McLuhan once referred to as new media containing within it old media.

Watch McLuhan’s awesome cameo in Woody Allen’s classic Annie Hall.

OMG OMG MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND WOODY ALLEN!!!!!!

Thus, despite what David Brooks argues about the state of culture in the age of the iPhone in today’s NY Times, technologies don’t become hot just because they are new. Something more deeply ingrained all forms of life–necessity and luxury–are at work.

So next time a rapper wants to make it rain, I suggest a land-line telephone. Maybe even a cordless one to boot.

And to top it off, Sam is a friend of mine who lives in Brooklyn.  He's gonna be big-time, and am SURE he'd be willing to come talk to us.  (He wants to see more theater... ESPECIALLY our kind, obvi.)