Something as simple as the landline phone kept the members of a family connected to each other
WE read in last week’s Pirkei Avos (3:1) how, after our time in this world, we’re destined to give a din v’cheshbon before HaKadosh Baruch Hu. But what exactly is this accounting referring to? The Vilna Gaon explained the Mishnah’s statement this way: Din refers to the things we did in life, while cheshbon involves the missed opportunities, the things we could and ought to have been doing during the time we were busy doing what we shouldn’t have been. In our future accounting to Hashem, we’ll not only have to face up to our aveiros, but also to the mitzvos we lost out on while preoccupied with those transgressions.
The Gra’s words came to mind when I was thinking about technology, because it’s important to consider not just the pros and cons of the modality itself, but also what positive aspects of our lives in the long-ago, pre-smartphone age have been supplanted by that modality.
In her parenting newsletter, novelist and New York Times columnist Jessica Grose, a mother of two young girls, writes of her nostalgia “for the landline as the locus of inter-household communication.” Her older daughter, a fifth-grader, doesn’t have a phone yet, but is still able to text her friends on a tablet, and “since my daughters’ friends are not forced to exchange grudging pleasantries on the phone with me to gain access to them,” Mrs. Grose writes, “I don’t think I know my children’s friends quite as well as my parents knew mine.”
It’s not the only thing being lost with the phaseout of the family phone. Julia Cho, writing in the Atlantic, rues “the loss of the shared social space of the family landline.” She explains:
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