Telephone+-+Technicalities+and+Relation+to+Society

= = =Research Summary=
 * by Peter Ha**

When I chose the topic telephone, I was naive to think it was only a communication tool - a medium that allows us to communicate almost any where in the world. I believe any media tool is more than what it seems when you start to think about it and I believe this is what this project did. When I researched the phone, I was curious to how it impacts us environmentally, socially, technologically and through user interaction. There are always pros and cons to a subject and I tried to express both positive and negative effects.

I tried to explain the issues in technology how it creates obsolescence and privacy issues. People are constantly buying new cell phones and landline phones are being outdated, along with pay phones which once use to contribute to our economy. The obsolete phones are contributing to the waste in the environment. The environment is being depleted from resources for phone books and telephone parts and when we don't properly recycle, we are contributing to waste.

I also mapped out a telephone call and that lead to the interesting fact that phone numbers are designed for our short-term memory. There are seven numbers in a phone number but really its groups of 3's and 4's. Its broken down because we remember things better when things are broken into groups and we can only retain 5 to 9 items at once.

The telephone in society has gone a long way from reinforcing gender roles and creating a market for women through secretaries and operators. We still associate women to those roles. The telephone also indicates social status as it did back when it was first invented. The telephone was used only by the rich but in today's society, people who afford the latest cell phone indicates that they have the money and therefore seem rich.

Going through this process has allowed me to view the telephone in a different way. On the surface it is a communication tool, but it has also contributed to changing how we live our lives.

=Process Work=

**Research**




Initial Concept Maps






Final Infograph




**Bibliography**
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000658.html http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=phone%20number http://communication.howstuffworks.com/telephone.htm http://www.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone.htm http://www.kauniainen.fi/Comenius/germany/english/IMPACT.HTM