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leah mclaren

British Telecom has launched a new TV ad campaign to convince people to keep their home phones. The slogan: "If it's a conversation worth having, use a landline."

The first ad opens with a young guy calling his mother only to be cut off repeatedly by his mobile network (he then pleases Mum by switching to a landline). The most recent spot features a little girl crying because her divorced Dad only calls her on his cell - a sign she takes to mean he doesn't love her enough to call her on a real phone.

I know exactly how she feels.

I dislike talking on my cell almost as much as I loathe texting as a form of extended conversation. I'm reasonably good on e-mail. But you know how I really like to communicate? Grounded, at home, with a cup of tea nearby. In my view, there's just no substitute for a long, luxurious Sunday afternoon chat on the old home phone.

I realize this makes me some kind of techno-fossil, an aberration and traitor to my digital-savvy confreres. But it's a comfort thing. Like bucket seats, crimping irons or tape decks, I realize landlines are going the way of the dodo, but that doesn't make me adore the antiquated luxury of mine any less.

Cellphone use overtook landlines in Canada as early as 2007. Around the same time, research conducted for the European Commission suggested that 15 per cent of British households had eschewed the use of a landline in favour of going mobile-only. Sounds significant, but not when you compare it to countries like the Czech Republic or Finland, the majority of whose citizens have given up landlines altogether.

Trends in phone use can be attributed to a number of disparate factors, including the reliability of networks, population density and relative affluence. Finland, for example, happens to have a relatively small population in addition to being the home of Nokia, one of the world's biggest makers of mobile phones.

Then there are poorer countries that were not equipped with extensive landline networks to begin with. According to a recent BBC report, mobile-phone use in Africa outnumbers the use of fixed lines eight to one, making it the fastest-growing mobile-phone market in the world.

Given the landline's shrinking presence (and therefore its growing exclusivity), one begins to understand British Telecom's new strategy of marketing it as a luxury item - one that offers reliability and nostalgia value where mobiles are trendy and disposable.

Indeed, there is something fundamentally grounded - both literally and figuratively - about having a landline. It says, quite simply, I live here. Because I have lived a fairly peripatetic existence since childhood, I imagine that to some degree I cling to mine for comfort. I think of my landline as the umbilical batphone, as my parents are the only ones who call me on it.

But according to Hal Niedzviecki, whose book The Peep Diaries looks at the way technology has altered contemporary culture, I am, by keeping a landline, aligning myself with a bygone era - one that most of my peers (who don't see the point of paying twice, having two numbers and maintaining a clunky cordless handset) rid themselves of a while back. "The landline represents a clumsy analogue past," he wrote this week via e-mail, "a time when we didn't have every possible service available to us on demand, when we had to watch what everyone else was watching on TV, when we had to wait to use the phone because our sister was talking to her boyfriend, when our identities were more static because we didn't have multiple online platforms that constantly required our updating."

Okay, but what about the argument that, without landlines, the economy and maybe even civilization would collapse? Don't laugh. Last November, British government workers participated in a drill that simulated what might happen if there was a national communications failure spurred by natural disaster or a cyber-terror attack. The exercise, entitled White Noise, involved huge numbers of civil servants having their landlines switched off in an effort to test the response of the digital communication network. The drill, which was confined to specific regions, did not paralyze the kingdom as feared, but communications researchers told the BBC at the time that a real, widespread White Noise event would almost surely have disastrous results, crippling a mobile system that was suddenly taxed by tremendous demand.

During the great North American blackout of 2003, this is exactly what transpired - most cellphones in affected areas were knocked out, while the only reliable form of communication became, you guessed it, landlines.

As for Niedzviecki, he thinks, on a less cataclysmic note, that the very practice of talking on phones might soon disappear along with our landlines. Like many of his generation, 39-year-old Niedzviecki prefers e-mail or digital chat for communication purposes and shudders at the thought of telemarketers. "I do have a landline," he admits, "but I'm not much for answering the phone."

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