Are there any payphone news?

“Are there any news?” is a grammatical pique supposedly coined by newsman Horace Greeley.

In reply to that question one of his reporters is said to have replied “Not a new.”

If Horace Greeley were looking for payphone news and information today I would have to say there is nary a new, save for the occasional moribund new that another locality is down to its final public telephone.

Payphones and phone booths are on their way to becoming objects of nostalgia, and this Payphone Project I established so many years ago would seem to have moldered away in tandem with the public’s awareness of public telephony.

Payphones are not simply a disappearing bit of Americana but another example of the presumed obsolescence that I believe characterizes all technology. Today’s high-tech is tomorrow’s junk, and at times I lament that my Internet-based livelihoods have been built not with the tools of an artisan but with disposable gadgets and cheap plastic keyboards.

As the one or two people who still subscribe to this section’s RSS feed may have noticed I spent some time today cleaning up some old stories. I may plug in some other old stories from the last year or so in the coming days before moving forward. I am going to try to make this news section interesting — not by linking to every possible story which mentions payphones and phone booths but by expanding on the payphone as one of many technologies both evolving and devolving across generations. This will be a lightly updated section, the focus of which I am not certain, but for now I think it will focus on obsolete or nearly-obsolete technologies and their appearances in contemporary times.

I will also soon revive a message board at this site. I was forced by spam overload to remove a Payphone Project message board several years ago but it might be fun to see what randomness awaits a fresh and uninhabited message board that is linked to from throughout this and my other web sites. I am hoping for incoherentness settling into confusion and then some sort of focus among random humans who find themselves arbitrarily sharing a virtual space.