ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social and communicational importance of the unintended uses of the telephone, including their direct and indirect consequences. People have shown remarkable cleverness in finding foibles and flaws in both the technological design and the social engineering of communications systems. The telephone has astounding power to represent authority, and the messages that it bears, even if entirely fraudulent, can alter lives. Most pertinent is that without the labors of inventors and technologists, we would have no telephone system to spare so many unwanted steps. Yet people have been not only ingenious at using telephones to save effort in expected ways, such as new services, lower costs, greater convenience, but they have also shown great ingenuity at using the telephone in entirely unanticipated ways. The growing use of telephone equipment—faxes, mobile phones, voice mail, credit card calls from public telephones, 800 numbers-means that a growing trail of records is left.
