ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607190011
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PETER J. HOWE/THE BOSTON GLOBE
MAYBE 120 years ago Alexander Bell could foresee the day his famous call might be greeted by a beep and a recorded voice saying, ``This is Thomas Augustus Watson. I can't come to the phone right now, but please leave a message.''
But could the father of the telephone ever imagine that one day his trusty assistant Watson might be standing right there, letting his answering machine ``screen'' his boss's calls and deciding whether he felt like answering?
As the telephone has evolved since Bell's day from a boon to a basic to a bane, people's sense of their obligation to answer a ringing phone has changed radically as well, an idea explored by a Pennsylvania State psychology professor.
Author Peter B. Crabb, who is fascinated by the way technology changes norms of social behavior, confirmed through polling college students what many Americans - especially telemarketers and in-laws - have already found out: Ignoring or screening calls, which would have been inconceivable 15 years ago, has become widely acceptable.
To Crabb and other psychologists and communications scholars, that is one example of how Americans, overwhelmed by demands for their attention, are resorting not just to technological filters but behavior that would once have been seen as unthinkable. Throwing out mail unopened, hanging up on telemarketers, refusing to open the front door to strangers, ignoring anyone who accosts them on a city street - all have become socially acceptable responses to a mounting sense of invasion by the outside world.
Feeling under siege
``People do have a feeling of being bombarded,'' said Marianne LaFrance, a Boston College social psychologist. Particularly because of the telephone and also electronic mail, she said, ``there's a real increase in others' access to us, and we want to have control over that access. It's hugely important psychologically.''
For his study, Crabb asked 435 college students - both owners and nonowners of answering machines - whether and when they would approve of not answering a phone.
His study, reported in the June issue of the Journal of Social Behavior and Responsibility, found that people without machines generally disapproved of just letting a phone ring, but machines owners saw nothing wrong with letting it answer - even if free to pick up.
Not surprisingly, people from both groups were much more likely to approve of letting the machine answer if they were in the bathroom or doing homework, in psych-speak the ``situational demand for privacy.''
Overall, Crabb wrote, ``Personally answering telephone calls appears to have become more of an option than a strongly prescribed social responsibility.'' Although it may be that people who want to screen calls buy machines, Crabb thinks it is more likely that purchasing machines lessens their sense that they have a duty to answer the phone.
Answering machines are just one of many technologies that Crabb believes will change our behavior.
``I think this is a big question, because there's nothing we do that doesn't involve technology. Everything we do, from sleeping to work to sex to entertaining, there's technology in the background, and it is definitely doing something to us.''
Uninhibited and aggressive
Crabb is researching how video recorders have a ``dis-inhibition'' effect that makes owners far more willing to snoop on their neighbors ``and film them having sex or whatever'' than they would be if empty-handed.
He has also grown interested in other behavior-changing effects of technology, such as the way getting behind the wheel of a car makes people dramatically more rude and aggressive, or the way improved plumbing technology has raised etiquette standards for hygiene.
In the case of people's changing response to the phone, some see parallels to another medium: mail. Fifty years ago, throwing out mail unopened would likely have been as unthinkable as ignoring a ringing phone. Now, with Americans inundated by 70 billion pieces of junk mail each year, the challenge for direct-mail marketers is just getting people to open them, by designing ever-catchier envelopes.
At least 11 percent of all junk mail goes unopened, according to the Postal Service (which makes big profits on third-class mail and has incentives to undercount the figure). Advertisers consider a mail campaign a big success if one recipient in 50 responds. So the $350 billion-a-year mail-marketing industry has grown ever more clever, with envelopes that look like tax refunds and machines that create what look like hand-scratched addresses.
In the case of phone calls, the MultiMedia Telecommunications Association estimates that 68 percent of U.S. households have answering machines, but estimates of how many use them to screen calls range widely. A 1993 Gallup poll commissioned by Phonemate, which makes answering machines, found more than half of machine owners used them to screen calls sometimes.
But a 1994 study in Public Opinion Quarterly by Robert W. Oldendick and Michael W. Link of the University of South Carolina said that ``at most, 2 to 3 percent of households use answering machines to screen calls,'' a figure based on 1989-92 surveys in South Carolina that they said may well be higher now, especially in more urbanized areas.
Nevertheless, Oldendick and Link said call screening is likely to become a problem for pollsters trying to get representative population samples by phone. People who do screen calls tend to be wealthier, younger, better educated and suburban, so the ``threat to representativeness is increasing,'' they wrote.
With the telephone, another factor is that Americans are simply subject to far more phone calls than ever before. Census Bureau figures indicate the average working American spent 97 minutes talking on the phone during the business day in 1993, up 11 percent from just three years earlier. That average includes factory and farm workers, so numbers for phone-dependent white-collar workers are much higher. AT&T estimates total calling volume has sextupled in the last 10 years, driven by modems and faxes but also more voice calls.
As the inflation-adjusted cost of long-distance calling has dropped 60 percent over the last decade, according to AT&T's Brian Monahan, calling out-of-state is no longer reserved for hurried announcements of deaths and engagements but is affordable to telemarketers and relatives we'd rather not hear from.
``An increasing proportion of the U.S. public views the telephone as a threat to their privacy,'' professor William H. Dutton of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication believes.
Talk to a machine
And though few hard numbers seem to exist, many people are coming to prefer communicating with machines than people. In business, many people prefer sending e-mail or asking for someone's voice mail instead of having an actual conversation or leaving a message with a slow-handed secretary.
``Human interactions are demanding, even simple ones,'' said Boston College's LaFrance. ``We still tend to think that human interactions should have some sense of courtesy and formality. On the phone or in e-mail, we don't have to deal with someone's emotional state. ... I can be less polite and more cursory.''
That preference for impersonal contact extends beyond telecommunications to, for example, banking and commuting. Americans now are happy to do business with more than 110,000 automated teller machines, buy 85 percent of their gasoline self-serve, and snap up electronic turnpike ``cruise cards'' that allow them to zip by toll collectors without even slowing.
``We've started to duck human contact,'' Crabb said, adding that as people retreat from reading their mail or answering the phone or doorbell, it is increasingly to avoid someone trying to sell them something. ``I hate to point the finger at business, but they're the ones who are abusing these channels and poisoning the well,'' Crabb said.
One big reason for the soaring popularity of the Internet and electronic mail - which Forrester Research in Cambridge estimates 11 million Americans now have at home, plus millions more at work - may be that it has remained until recently one channel where people can control who can reach them.
Office no haven
So far, there's no phone book for e-mail, but that has not stopped advertisers and salespeople from finding ways to compile ``e-mailing lists'' and blitz people's work terminals.
That, in turn, has produced a technological and behavioral counterattack: ``agent programs'' that spike any unsolicited e-mail that comes from addresses other than those the recipient has specified as welcome.
Four years ago, said Boston College psychologist LaFrance, she was delighted that joining the Internet had revolutionized her power to communicate quickly and efficiently with people worldwide. But her e-mail address has since been grabbed by dozens of list-makers. Now she has a program to curb unwanted mail, and whatever still gets through she zaps, unread.
So in just a few years, for LaFrance and thousands of others, e-mail has completed the cycle that took the telephone a century and the mails even longer: ``First we want and enjoy access, but then there's that overload factor,'' LaFrance said. By resorting to filtering devices or just being rude and cutting off unwanted correspondents, ``We reassert control over it.''
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