A small plastic box that beeped and flashed numbers was a lifeline for Laurie Dove in 1993. Pregnant with her first child in a house larger than any rural town in Kansas, Dove used a small black device to communicate with her husband as she went into medical labor. goods. He carried one more. They had a code.
“If I really needed something, I would text ‘9-1-1.’ That meant anything from, ‘I’m going to struggle now’ to ‘I really need to get you,’” she recalls. “It was our version of texting. I was as nervous as a cat with a long tail in a room full of rockers. It was important.”
Beepers and all they symbolized — communication with each other or, in the 1980s, drugs — went the way of answering machines decades ago when smartphones erased them from popular culture. They reappeared tragically on Tuesday when thousands of pagers went off simultaneously in Lebanon, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands in a mysterious, multi-day attack as Israel announced a new phase in its war with Hezbollah.
In many of the images, blood marks the place where pagers are often cut – on the belt, in the pocket, near the hand – in clear reminders of how closely people still hold those devices and the links – or vulnerability – they give power.
Then right now – albeit in very small numbers – pagers are used precisely because they are old school. They run on batteries and radio waves, making them impervious to dead zones without Wi-Fi, basements with no cell service, hacks and catastrophic network outages like those during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Some medical professionals and emergency workers prefer pagers to cell phones or use the devices together. They are useful for workers in remote areas, such as oil rigs and mines. Busy restaurants use them, too, offering customers blinking, hockey puck-like contraptions that vibrate when your table is ready.
For those who do not trust data collection, pagers are attractive because they have no way to track users.
“A mobile phone at the end of the day is like a computer that you’re carrying, and the pager is part of that complexity,” says Bharat Mistry, UK technology director for Trend Micro, a cybersecurity software company. “These days it’s used by people who want to keep their privacy … You don’t want to be tracked but you want to be contacted.”
Pages became the first iteration of ‘always on’
Since the beginning, people have been conflicted about pagers and the annoying feeling of being called at someone else’s convenience.
Inventor Al Gross, considered by some to be the “founding father” of wireless communication, patented the pager in 1949 with the goal of making it available to doctors. But they declined, he said, hoping to be on call 24/7.
“The doctors didn’t want anything to do with it because it would interfere with their golf game or it would interfere with the patient,” Gross said in a video made when he received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. it was a success, as I thought it would be when it was first launched. But that changed later.”
In the 1980s, millions of Americans used pagers, according to reports at the time. The devices were status symbols — belt-clipped signs that the wearer was important enough to, in fact, be on the phone at a moment’s notice. Doctors, lawyers, movie stars and journalists wore them in the 1990s. In 1989, Sir Mix-a-Lot wrote a song about them, singing: “Beep diddy beep, I’ll call you maybe.”
By then, the pagers had also become involved with drug traffickers and schools were being destroyed. More than 50 school districts, from San Diego to Syracuse, New York, banned their use in schools, saying they interfered with the fight to control drug abuse among teenagers, the New York Times reported in 1988. .
“How can we expect students to ‘just say no to drugs’ when we allow them to wear the most prominent sign of drug sales on their belts,” said James Fleming, deputy superintendent of Dade County Public Schools in Florida. saying.
By the mid-90s, more than 60 million beepers were in use, according to Spok, a telecommunications company.
Dove, who went on to serve as mayor of Valley Center, Kansas, and became an author, says he and his family use cell phones now. But that means accepting the risk of identity theft. Somehow, he fondly remembers the simplicity of pagers.
He says: “I worry about that. “But that risk feels like part of life now.”
The pager market today is small but persistent
The number of pagers worldwide is hard to come by. But more than 80% of Spok’s dating business is health care, with about 750,000 subscribers across all major hospital systems, according to Vincent Kelly, the company’s CEO.
“When there’s an emergency, their phones don’t always work,” Kelly said, adding that pager signals are often stronger than cellphone signals in hospitals with thick walls or concrete basements. Cell phone networks “are not designed to handle every subscriber trying to call at the same time or send a message at the same time.”
Members of Iran-backed Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border have used pagers to communicate for years. In February, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, ordered Hezbollah members to give up their cellphones in an effort to avoid what is believed to be sophisticated Israeli surveillance of Lebanon’s cellphone networks.
Tuesday’s attack appeared to be Israel’s latest offensive against Hezbollah. But the widespread use of pagers in Lebanon means that gunfire is costing a large number of civilian casualties. Explode them for a moment in the surroundings of everyday life – including homes, cars, grocery stores and cafes.
Kelly says first responders and major manufacturers use pagers. Manufacturers have workers use devices on factory floors to prevent them from taking pictures.
Many medical staff use a combination of pagers, chat rooms, text messages and other tools to communicate with patients without revealing their home numbers — an effort to be truly off-duty when they’re not working.
Dr. Christopher Peabody, an emergency physician at San Francisco General Hospital, uses pagers every day — even though he doesn’t want to. “We are on a mission to eliminate pagers, but we are failing miserably,” said Peabody, who is also the director of the UCSF Acute Care Innovation Center.
Peabody said he and others at the hospital tested the new system and “the pager won”: Doctors stopped responding to two-way messages and would only respond to pagers.
In a way, Peabody understands resistance. Pages provide some autonomy. Conversely, two-way communication carries the expectation that you will respond quickly and can provide an avenue for follow-up questions.
The problem, Peabody says, is that paging is a one-way communication and providers can’t communicate back and forth using a paging system. He said the technology is not working well. And paging systems aren’t necessarily secure, which is a critical issue in an industry that must keep patient information confidential.
“This has been a medical practice for many, many years,” he said, “and the pager is here to stay, probably for the most part.”
-Laurie Kellman and Sarah Parvini, Associated Press
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