{"id":3160,"date":"2008-05-20T14:02:56","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T18:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/2008\/05\/20\/3160\/"},"modified":"2008-05-20T21:27:16","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T01:27:16","slug":"3160","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2008\/05\/20\/3160\/","title":{"rendered":"The nostalgia of phone booths"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A few years ago I taught an independent media class at Humber College. One of my assignments for the students was to create a tiny publication for ourselves to demonstrate how easy it is to be a self-publisher. The topic of our tiny book was the pay phone.<\/p>\n

My students did an inventory of pay phones along major downtown streets at the start of the semester — but four months later at the end of the term, we found that about 10% of the pay phone booths had already been removed. We combined our collective heads to surmise that cell phones were killing off the pay phone (and soon after Bell announced it would raise the price for an individual call from 25 cents to 50 cents<\/a>). Even the iconic red British telephone booth<\/a> saw its numbers reduced by 10,000<\/a> between 2004 and 2006.<\/p>\n

But, as with any piece of street furniture these days, the phone booth is an opportunity to advertise to the masses. A few years back, Bell tried to convince the City of Toronto they should be able to sell third-party ads, but this idea was rejected. In New York City, on-street phone booths actually provide more revenue from advertising<\/a> than from out-going calls, which means the pay phone demise in the Big Apple may take longer than in other cities.<\/p>\n

So, it was with a sense of nostalgia that I walked around the CNE yesterday photographing some of the well-maintained, retro-ish phone booths<\/a> that dot the Exhibition grounds. These booths represent the changing dynamics of communication in our culture, similar to the shift from telegraph to telephone; from films in movie theatres to TVs in living rooms; and even the shift away from posters on lamp posts to promoting events on Facebook.<\/p>\n

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