It was so cool that I knew it was only a matter of time before everyone would talk to each other on high-quality digital lines. Calls would become more personal and intimate—Think of the whispers, the breaths, the inflection of a dry joke. You could play music for friends and family, or share the ambient sound of the birds chirping on your porch. I knew once people had tried it, they would never settle for a regular phone again.

As we now know, I was totally wrong! We’ve grown to hate our phones so much that we’ve reverted back to typing. It’s the revenge of the telegraph.

Think of the great strides in communication in the last decade—LCD screens, digital camera chips and streaming Internet video, to name three. Meanwhile, our phone calls have gotten steadily worse.

At least once a week, I have to struggle to conduct a phone interview with somebody who’s calling me with Skype or some other computer-based phone service. I can always tell when I’m on a VOIP call—the caller sounds as if he’s talking through a snorkel. It comes off as cheap and unprofessional, but increasingly, the people I talk to prefer making calls this way.

And let’s consider cell phones. Really: They suck. The mobile companies keep trucking out new features while sacrificing call quality. Digital cell phones sounded worse than the analog ones did, and smart phones sound worse than conventional digital phones. With all the data services the telecom companies are trying to sell, the voice call has become an after-thought. Networks are jammed and reliability is poor. Have you tried using an iPhone in New York City lately?

Gradually, our culture has adjusted to account for the underwhelming experience of making a phone call. I remember having two-hour-long phone conversations with friends, and conducting hour-long source interviews at the newspapers where I worked just a few years ago. But these days, I seldom make calls that last longer than a few minutes. People have shunned their phones and prefer texting, e-mail and social networking messages. Journalists conduct interviews by e-mail. People ask each other out on dates using Facebook. Socially, it’s easier. Phone calls were always a little uncomfortable, right?

I submit that this change happened not because typing is better, but because the experience of talking on the phone has gotten so unpleasant. We have to strain to hear each other, and we worry that our words will be misheard; phone calls have become even more awkward than before. We’ve cut our land-lines and begun using lightweight plastic things that don’t fit well against the sides of our head. We’ve grown accustomed to counting minutes, even for local calls. We’ve donned headsets so we can talk while driving, and turned our laptops into snorkel-phones so we can talk via WiFi at Starbucks. (Is that noise on the line, or an espresso machine?)

This is one of those ways where a small adjustment in technology could have had a radical impact on how we communicate. If phones had drifted toward high-quality lines instead of digital compression—gotten clearer and better, rather than smaller and cheaper—society would be different. We might have developed an improved command of the spoken word. Instead, we evolved super-fast typing fingers.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Which makes me wonder, why own DVDs at all? My modest, tightly-edited DVD collection takes up one shelf of a narrow bookcase. Like my long-obsolete CD collection, seeing it sometimes fills me with buyer’s remorse. Eight discs of “Arrested Development” sit there mocking me, now that every single episode is available free online. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Casablanca,” and “Vertigo” are there too—and also available streaming from Netflix.

Netflix does cost money. But $10 a month seems damn cheap considering the alternatives: Video store rentals, Pay Per View, premium cable. I’m not opposed to occasionally buying shows a la carte. If I want something right away that Netflix doesn’t have for streaming (such as recent episodes of “Mad Men”), I may buy it from iTunes.

It’s the physical DVD I’m happy to live without. With so many shows online, buying a disc that only has one program on it seems like an idea from the distant past. What a model of inefficiency. What a waste of plastic!

I am using my DVD player with such decreasing frequency that I doubt I will ever upgrade to a Blu-Ray player. My next computer, especially if it’s a Mac tablet, might not even have an optical drive. TV shows and movies are all going to be on the cloud. Another point of friction in the media marketplace disappears. There’s one fewer reason to exchange money for “content.”

And Rupert Murdoch thinks I’m going to pay to read the news?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Worst: Years ago, during my first-ever visit to New York City, my friends and I walked to Macy’s Herald Square, rode about 11 flights of escalators, and rode them back down. “The World’s Largest Store” functions adequately as a tourist attraction, but as a place to buy stuff, it’s a debacle. Its floorplan is chaotic, its pricing is erratic, and its salespeople are surly. Macy’s is constantly mailing me 25%-off coupons that seem like good deals, but have fine print so complicated you need the help of an accountant to understand all the exclusions. Twice now I’ve walked out of the store in mid-purchase because a coupon wouldn’t scan, and a sales-clerk blamed it on my failure to be functionally literate. (Am I the first person to think “Menswear” means “men’s clothes”?) And no, I don’t want to save ten percent with a Macy’s card! Macy’s? Over! Happily, in this city I have lots of other options.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Who’s the audience for this bad stand-up schlock? Children? Doesn’t the mess we’re in demand smart, funny, cutting humor? Aren’t we, as Americans, better than this?

We have evolved a lot since the days of Thomas Nast and Boss Tweed. Even our best editorial cartoonists, like Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall, are fading quickly from the landscape as alt weeklies whither. Taking their place are a whole new generation of multimedia humorists. Now we’ve got The Onion, SNL, Comedy Central, and everybody who’s ever cut a snicker-worthy political video for YouTube. While Delonas was finishing his cartoon, a thousand bloggers and a million Twitter users were spewing out witty commentary on the stimulus bill. The stuff you read on Wonkette is better than any op-ed cartoon.

An editor at the Post should have caught the unintended, racist double-meaning of this cartoon and rejected it. But speaking to a bigger issue, why are newspapers still printing totally lame editorial cartoons? The editorial cartoon is dead. Thanks for reminding us, Delonas.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This is how you get a headline: Let it slip that you’re planning to eliminate two entire subway lines!

The Daily News has a story today speculating that the MTA’s upcoming budget proposal will slash jobs and kill the W and Z trains.

As a reminder to those of you who don’t live in New York, subway lines here are not like subway lines in other cities. Most NYC Subway lines share track with other lines, and most stations are served by multiple trains. So when you eliminate a line, there’s always another train to pick up the slack. How would this work if the W and the Z go to the great rail yard in the sky? Time to play Fantasy Subway:

Let’s start with the Z train, since that’s easiest. It’s an express J. They could have called it the J Diamond. A lot of New Yorkers have never even seen a Z train. Kill it. Over!

The W is more complicated. It’s a daytime local on the Broadway line in Manhattan and then runs local up to Astoria in Queens. It stops running after 9 p.m. weekdays and doesn’t run at all on weekends, when the N runs local in Manhattan to haul tourists from Times Square to Ground Zero alleviate crowding. Eliminating the W without making other adjustments will mean the R will be the only local train on the Broadway line on weekdays. I have a hunch the MTA would just put the weekend schedule in effect all week for the Broadway line: No W, R local, N local, Q express. That makes a lot of sense, but they would have to run more Q trains, especially to pick up passengers riding over the Manhattan bridge to and from Brooklyn, and enough N trains for the rush hour riders in Astoria. An alternative would be to ramp up R service on the Broadway local line during rush hours, and stop the weird rush hour M service on the 4th Avenue line in Brooklyn (which has to share track with the R).*

Most likely scenario: Public outcry will pop this trial balloon. The state will cough up a few more bucks, the MTA will raise fairs fares, and the cuts will hit other things that still hurt the quality of the subway experience but that don’t sound so drastic.

* UPDATE: WCBS-TV reports that the MTA is considering cutting the M line in half, which I’m guessing means stop the 4th Avenue rush hour service. Same treatment may be in store for the hapless G train.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I left Charlottesville, Virginia, this morning. I was supposed to board a 10:20 United flight to Dulles. But that plane was already behind schedule, leaving me no time to make my connection. The airline courteously booked me on an on-time U.S. Airways flight to Charlotte, where I could get a connecting flight to Newark. Fine.

Actually, not fine. In Charlotte, my plane left on time and taxied out. It sat on the tarmac for two and a half hours. Then it taxied back. Now I’m part of a planeload of passengers waiting in the terminal while the airline negotiates with air traffic control for permission to land its plane in Newark. The latest word is that we’re supposed to take off at 5:30 – four hours late. The official explanation for the delay? “Weather.” Except it’s an absolutely beautiful day all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the departure boards show most of the other flights are on time.

If I’d left my hotel this morning and kept driving to Brooklyn, instead of to the airport, I’d be there by now. Now I am further away from home than when I started.

Also of interest: At no point today has anyone asked to see my identification.

Update: The plane landed in Newark more than four hours late. The pilot explained that landings were slow-going into Newark due to “puffy clouds.” My suitcase followed about 20 minutes later, arriving on a different plane.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I may be wrong about Twitter, but I’m pretty sure it’s over. We’ve given it long enough. We’ve been patient. It’s not poised to break out of the nerd community. It’s not the next big thing.

Why is Twitter doomed to be a niche player? It takes too much work to sort through all the noise. Twitter represents the purest form of Web 2.0′s biggest problem: A crowd of people unsure what they want to hear matched with a crowd of people with nothing interesting to say. As a communications tool, it offers very little that the average person can’t get from a blog or Facebook or MySpace.

When Twitter was new, I started an account for lurking purposes. Work-wise, it has been of no help to my reporting. The sources I care most about – the ones who are well-informed about my beat, which is professional photography – are not on Twitter. They don’t know about Twitter. They are too busy. If you explained Twitter to them (“You post just a sentence or two at a time, even a text from your cell phone, telling people what you’re doing all day long”) they would think you were a loser. And they’d be right.

Apart from work, I don’t have any urge to share a minute-by-minute account of my life. When I have something that deserves a mention, I put it here on this blog (via text message if appropriate).

Even though I have never posted anything to my Twitter account, nor told anyone about it until now, 18 people have signed up to follow me. I don’t know who most of them are. I think a few of them are spammers. If you’re one of them, let the record note that I actually do a lot of things. I’m just not one to Twitter about it.

Counterpoint: Charles Cooper: For some reason, Twitter hasn’t yet taken the journalist community by storm.

Update: I had this post cued up in advance and failed to notice my friend Bret was blogging about the same thing. He’s in the Twitter camp. Like I said, I could be wrong about this one.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I’m talking about smoking, in all its glowing sexiness. This hazy cloud shows no sign of dissipating from popular entertainment.

I have a simple relationship with smoking. I don’t smoke because I have a low opinion of cancer. The few times I have smoked cigarettes, I enjoyed them. But I realized that I’m the sort of person who looks kind of dippy holding a cigarette. (The point of your 20s, I think, is to identify the behaviors that make you look or feel ridiculous, and gradually expunge them from your life.)

Moreover, tobacco companies have such a long and well-known history of evildoing that no one with any scruples would work for one today. Therefore, all tobacco company employees are unscrupulous.

Which brings us to celebrity smokers. A voluntary ban on tobacco advertising in magazines took effect last year (Oh, you didn’t know that?). You can’t air cigarette ads on TV or put them on billboards or even name a NASCAR race after them. Tobacco ads are over! – cultural waste to be recycled and mocked by Richard Prince and “Mad Men.”

Backed into a corner, tobacco companies are known to resort to desperate measures. Secret product placements in magazines and films and TV shows – ones that everyone, if asked, can *cough cough* plausibly deny – seem so rational that it’s hard to believe they aren’t happening.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.”

Prewritten obits sound a lot stronger when you read them in the back of the newspaper (toward the bottom of a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning), rather than on the front of a breaking news Web site. I need to know how the fellow died, please hold the polysyllabic exuberance.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Those of us too young to get why Jaws was a big deal remember Scheider as the captain of the SeaQuest. He’s the man I’d want in charge of my massive, teardrop-shaped, torpedo-armed, research submarine.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.