Slashdot Mirror
Lamenting the Demise of Hangups
An anonymous reader writes "Ian Bogost writes about a cultural tradition we've mostly lost as smartphones have become ubiquitous: hanging up. While we still use the terminology (in the same way we say 'rewind' when skipping backward on our DVR), the physical act of hanging up a telephone when we're done using it no longer occurs. And we don't get that satisfying crash and clatter when hanging up on somebody to make a point. 'In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely, sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said something: we're done, go away. ... Today a true hangup — one you really meant to perform out of anger or frustration or exhaustion — is only temporary and one-sided even when it is successfully executed. Even during a heated exchange, your interlocutor will first assume something went wrong in the network, and you could easily pretend such a thing was true later if you wanted. Calls aren't ever really under our control anymore, they "drop" intransitively.' It's an interesting point about the minor cultural changes that go along with evolving technology."
Make an aggressive hang-up app.
This is really just an updated version of Seinfeld's cordless phone bit
With all the craaps out there, how can there not be an app that plays a phone-slamming sound over the connection and then disconnects the call?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
n/t
...this is a crappy Soulskill post.
Even for a slow Saturday night.
Couldn't you find another Apple linkbait troll piece to post instead? You know, "Rumor Says New OS X Release Locked to Processor." You know, the lame crap that gets posted here every day which is still better than this...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Preface disconnecting with the following: "This is me hanging up on you".
the full duplex, circuit-switched, not-laggy realtime conversations I used to have on a landline phone. I could be talking, and the other party could be talking at the same time, and both of us could hear each other and understand everything.
The young uns here will probably think I'm making this up. I'm not; back in the day, Candace Bergen could drop a pin and I could hear it over the phone.
This is nonsense. People still hang up on each other. The load crash just isnt there... instead its a simple call ended. Then they attempt to call back unsure if you did it on purpose only to get voicemail. Then it dawns on them.
If you want to hang up on someone and deliver the same experience, just shout "fuck you!" and tap the "end call" button. You get the same satisfaction and they'll get the message. Is that so hard?
Scorta futuere amo!
yes, and a generation of kids will grow up clicking on a stylized picture of a floppy disk to save things, without having ever used a floppy disk.
This is news how?
So this here is why we have copyright, to protect the inane misguided ramblings of those who have nothing constructive to say but are desperate for people to listen to them. So we call it "art" and give them a monopoly on their inanity for several generations.
If only hangups really were on the decline. Seems to me people have more and more of them these days. The day when nobody has any hangups at all will be a great one for the human race.
Yeah, when my process gets a SIGKILL it doens't know what happened (or even THAT it happened), but when it gets a SIGHUP it knows someone or some thing hung up on it or at least pretended to.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I work in a call center where we still have physical phones (though we only use headsets), I remember hearing about one supervisor call where the sup eventually advised the customer that there was nothing more to discuss and he was going to end the call, he picked up the receiver, de-activated the headset then hung up the receiver, just for the sound.
Not to mention that the idea put forward here was done on a Seinfeld episode years ago.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"Calls aren't ever really under our control anymore, they "drop" intransitively.' "
The writer must be living in some 3rd world country, like Usa maybe?
The best hangup is when, mid-conversation, you whip your cell phone off a wall, smashing it into a million pieces. Didn't have those in the old hangup days, did you?
we don't get that satisfying crash and clatter when hanging up on somebody to make a point.
We also don't have to get up early to shoe our horses anymore. Bummer.
Dare I say that one could "improve" on the so-called hangup, and make it arbitrarily more obnoxious if so desired. Hell, in place of the end call button, present a menu of your favored obnoxious call termination options.
Better act quick though; this brilliant innovation is just the thing patents are made for!
...about as much as I miss putting a new roll in the fax machine. i.e. not at all.
But then again I bet if you look hard enough you'll find an old fart who thinks that VHS tapes are superior to Bluray.
Before we had the phone, there was no way to hangup at all! Let's lament the lack of smacking someone on the face and stalking off!
Anyone I'd hang up on like that would already just ring straight through to voice mail. Not that I actually associate with anyone I'd hang up on like that. I suppose in a hypothetical situation where I did, I could return their call specifically to hang up on them. But then I'd have to tell them that. "Hey! I called you back, just to hang up on your! (click!)" Maybe the poster isn't putting enough artistry into his hanging up! Or maybe he's just hanging out with the wrong people.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Swear at the person, then hit "End".
#DeleteChrome
I keep hearing people talk about "dropped calls" - is that when the landline develops a fault and the audio keeps dropping out? I don't know if they still do that, because I haven't had a landline phone for about ten years - and their inherent unreliability is one of the reasons I got rid of it.
Depending on whatever the hanging-up was for...
Telemarketers. It is not illegal to call random people by thousands at a time to try to sell them something. It is illegal to do that using cellular phones (or faxes), People without landlines, or with VoIP landlines don't have to deal with that anymore, however when we had switched landlines, it was multiple times a day that you have to answer to some sleazy salesman. They even messed with caller IDs when people started using them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Jerry Seinfeld summed this up years ago in one of his standup routines.
Has the author never seen a cordless phone? You know, what practically everyone who still uses a land line has? You can't hang that up either. In fact, the only thing keeping the aggressive hang up going was the flip hone.
Oh, I don't know. I find it fascinating that somebody is able to make a living by making facile commentaries on how telephone etiquette changes over time.
Who do I need to fuck to get a job like this?
I needn't slam a phone to tell the other person on the phone that I'm done with him.
We recently invented a technology called "talking". It allows to "tell" them instead of using possibly ambiguous actions that may be misinterpreted. "Go to hell, you old bastard" is hard to misinterpret.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are tons of words that are in use that derive from something else - yet people still cope.
It is neither novel nor clever to point these out. And even worse to make a Slashdot article about a stupid observation. Hang-up means "to end a phone call" - the term is derived from the action of older phones, where hanging the receiver on the phone ended the call.
I'm going to bed to do some that's word has these origins:
"The long-standing speculation is that this Latin word is altered (probably by influence of turbare "to stir up") from *manstuprare, from manu, ablative of manus "hand" (see manual) + stuprare "defile" (oneself), from stuprum "defilement, dishonor," related to stupere "to be stunned, stupefied" (see stupid). "
What about for the recipient of a modern hang-up? You don't hear a dial tone on cell phones when that happens, just silence. Kind of takes the bite out of someone hanging up on you.
You clearly need someone to send you printed instructions to download Whatsapp :)
Or maybe they could just Voxer you
When I am in a conversation and the other person suddenly hangs up, I will know that the person calling was the cause or that it was a technical issue. Ask anybody and they will tell you that they can tell the difference.
This is the case when I am on the phone and the other person calls with a cellphone. This happens when the other person is on a landline.
What you do not have with a cellphone that you have with a landline is, as caller the satisfaction of slamming the horn down, missing the phone in anger and needing to slam it down several more times.
If you missed, the callee could hear the callers frustration and giggle, However if he did not miss, you would not hear all the noise and you still were sure that the person hung up on you.
So in the past you suddenly did not hear the person anymore. Now you suddenly do not hear the person anymore. There is no difference, except maybe in the theatrical sense.
And yes, we still use the same words for things. That is language. I am sure there are many words we use for things that we do not even know what the original meaning was. That is why ethymology exists.
My guess is that this is about trying to be nostalgic, while there is nothing to be nostalgic about.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Stories like this are like a broken record.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
From Catch-22:
"It takes brains not to make money," Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's signature. "Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money."
"T. S. Eliot," ex-P. F. C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting cubicle at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters and slammed down the telephone without identifying himself.
General Peckem roused himself after a moment with an unctuous and benignant smile. His expression was shrewd and sophisticated. His eyes gleamed maliciously. "Have someone get me General Dreedle," he requested Colonel Cargill. "Don't let him know who's calling." Colonel Cargill handed him the phone.
"T. S. Eliot," General Peckem said, and hung up.
Today, someone would ponder why Wintergreen would slam down the phone, since that would break the screen.
We have the "End Call" button. We just need an app that adds "Hung up" and "Hang up hard" buttons, that insert the sound of a legacy phone receiver hitting the holder. The app needs to randomize these sounds, otherwise a "Hang up silencer" app will come out. Well, it probably will, anyway. And we'll probably end up with a market in "hang up sounds", like spitting, laughing, mooing, etc.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What we really need is an app that generates a *plonk* sound, hangs up, and dumps the caller into a block list.
Log in or piss off.
It took me years of psychotherapy to get rid of my hangups. Why would I be sad about their demise?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I imagine the screen or the case would crack, plus a smartphone is usually expensive to replace.
Back when you were throwing that Nokia E63 at the wall, it cost as much as a smartphone does now. Once all the smartphone data is kept in the cloud so you don't have to manually recreate it, you will be able to start gratuitously ruining them again.
..but becomes an expensive habit.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
First of all, If you are simply hanging up on someone, then you are just doing it wrong....
Secondly, disconnects became relatively common as people started buying cordless phones (as opposed to cell phones) as the battery would die unexpectedly. Cordless phones became common in the 90's. This, in my opinion, is what changed how people viewed disconnects (i.e. the need to call back), not today's cell phone usage. In other words, this behaviour change started much sooner than you think.
Finally, who just hangs up the phone? No matter how angry, disgusted, or stressed most people will at least say something to indicate that the conversation is over. In my opinion, anyone who doesn't, and hangs up deliberately, is either consciously or subconsciously indicating that they want to continue the conversation, but on their terms. Of course, the other party doesn't know this, so it is a completely useless gesture....
It is no longer illegal to telemarket to cell phones in America. Law was changed a year or so ago, maybe slightly more but within the last couple of years.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Intransitively is a perfectly cromulent word. And it's use is valid, if something of a stretch.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
for example, in german the word hangup "aufhängen" was displaces by "auflegen" (to lay sth. down), like you did with the old telecom telephones with keys on one big block and a receiver to hold at your ear. Of course, you could try to implement this by an app, which hangs up when you lay down the phone ... but face it, you did not hang up or lay down your DECT mobile, as well.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone hang up when I slam them down on the table.
The Galaxy also mutes when I cover the screen with my hand.
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.
Kriston
It shouldn't be hard to make an app for that. Digitize the crash of a bakelite handset on a rotary phone, and make an app that plays that clip before disconnecting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If someone calls me and the call drops I'll call them back, immediately. That, to me, seems like common curtesy. But only if I know who the hell you are. If you block your number I'm not answering. If I don't call you back, fuck off and call someone else.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Then, I guess, they did not notice, because I never get those calls on my cellular and VoIP lines.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
(2) knuckle phone
(3) fast phone
rendered in a faux-retro style. It has also entered the Taylor Swift breakup-song stage:
Taylor Swift also discloses a phone-flinging episode in her song "Stay Stay Stay":"...I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night.
... I threw my phone across the room at you.
The object of her aggression/desire returns ready to talk, wearing a football helmet.
.
In fact, cell phone throwing has become so common-place now that the concept is even part of a Taylor Swift break-up song, Stay, Stay, Stay with the lyrics in the music video being: "... I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night.
... I threw my phone across the room at you.
The object of her aggression/desire returns ready to talk, wearing a football helmet.
You know it's trendy when Taylor Swift's all over it!