I was at Westmoreland State Park with my family today and I saw a payphone by the visitor’s center and immediately thought of The Wire Everywhere assignment for ds106. It’s interesting how the payphone is becoming a vestigial technology in a society where the majority of folks carry one in their pocket—in addition to it also being an extremely powerful computer.

I love the aesthetic of the payphone, and it’s a staple of season 1 of The Wire, so I figured I would document just that. It’s interesting how something as ubiquitous as this technology 25 years ago has all but disappeared in the wake of the mobile revolution. The idea of vanishing technology like the payphone is fascinating to me, and when Grant Potter set up #ds106radio so that you could broadcast to it from a payphone through an 800 number, I thought that was the coolest mashup of old and new technologies I’d ever seen. The absence of payphones is one of the more telling signs of the transformation of communication technologies over the course of a generation.

I can’t give myself any star credit for this assignment because I already did it, and it was just a picture.