{"id":31816,"date":"2022-05-12T16:44:18","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T16:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=31816"},"modified":"2022-05-12T13:03:51","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T17:03:51","slug":"vestiges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2022\/05\/12\/vestiges.html","title":{"rendered":"Vestiges"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"postie-post\">Yesterday was spent, unexpectedly, in pursuit of remnants, or archaelogical evidence, of the payphones of yore. Some have been gone for 2 decades. Others disappeared more recently. They are everywhere, though, so long as you know what you are looking at. Don&#8217;t mistake an old parking meter or a blue mailbox for a payphone site or I will ridicule you mercilessly. <\/p>\n<p> It ignited that tic of mine which a friend describ ed as &#8220;tourettes-like.&#8221; Once I found one I would remember that oh, right, there used to be anohter over here, and three over there, and then the transit hubs are littered with them&#8230; <\/p>\n<p> In my mind the payphones rise up, fully-formed, any time I approach one of their former locations.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<p> I was spurred into doing this by a press inquiry. Honestly, I had considered doing this just a couple of weeks ago but thought it sounded so predictable. I do maintain that the before-and-after conceit is just that: predictable.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<p> But like other atomic things that start to make sense only upon molecular\u00a0 accumulation I found the modern-day forensic evidence of a telecommunications past started to take on some poignancy. Why did they disappear, anyway? The cell phone is an obvious culprit but why should the wholesale removal of a reliable means of communication have taken place with solicitation of virtually no public input? <\/p>\n<p> A generation ago their absence would have been unthinkable in most cities. Today that former assumption of necessity\u00a0 is not just decapitated but full-body-itated. Only shreds and shards remain. Sometimes enough evidence remains to tell the story but other times you are looking at a ghost. <\/p>\n<p>\n \u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was spent, unexpectedly, in pursuit of remnants, or archaelogical evidence, of the payphones of yore. Some have been gone for 2 decades. Others disappeared more recently. They are everywhere, though, so long as you know what you are looking at. Don&#8217;t mistake an old parking meter or a blue mailbox for a payphone site [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saumAn-vestiges","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}