Hollywood’s Caller ID Hang-Up
In the movie “Along Came a Spider,” currently showing at your local googleplex, police psychologist Alex Cross has a tape recorder hooked up to his home phone, which lets him capture the telephonic rantings of the homicidal maniacs he pursues.
This slightly flabby thriller has Cross listening to a recording over and over in an attempt to locate a psycho who’s kidnapped a little girl.
The film turns on exotic technologies most people haven’t heard of, such as steganography, the ability to store encoded messages within a picture. But, bizarrely, “Along Came a Spider” doesn’t acknowledge the existence of a technology that nearly half of all Americans have in their homes today: Caller ID.
Caller ID shows the person receiving a call the phone number the call is being made from, and sometimes a name or corporation associated with that number. It’s a handy service that helps choosy users decide when to answer the phone.
Cross isn’t a moron. He’s just trapped in a movie with a California sensibility. See, Californians have been slow to embrace Caller ID. And the people who make movies are, by and large, Californians. Since most screenwriters know a Caller ID-free world, the technology hasn’t really shown up in movies.
Americans--those who don’t live in California, at least--love Caller ID. In Texas, for example, most homes have the service, and it’s become more popular than Call Waiting.
About 43% of homes nationwide have Caller ID, according to figures collected by Research First Consulting Inc., which collects such statistics for the telephone industry. Research First’s president, Ellis D. Hill, estimates that by 2002, more people will have Caller ID than not.
Except, of course, in California, where just 25% of users subscribe to the service. That’s up from 6.4% at the end of 1997--18 months after the service was introduced here--and 13.4% in 1999. Hill says California was the last state to allow phone companies to offer Caller ID, largely because of privacy concerns.
Giving away a phone number often gives away an address, which can then be used to obtain all sorts of information about someone. So before the phone company was allowed to introduce Caller ID in California, it had to pony up $34 million for a public advertising campaign designed to warn people about such hazards--this in a state where half of all the phone numbers are unlisted. Consumers can elect to block the consumer version of Caller ID, either through the phone company--which will prevent the information from flowing out to Caller ID subscribers on all calls--or by punching in Star 67, which will block the number for that particular call.
As a result of the ad campaign, for years most Californians had complete blocking on their calls, meaning most Caller ID subscribers got no information about such callers. That share of phone users with total blocking has since dropped to 39%.
And those relatively high levels of blocked calls have led to a lack of Caller ID subscribers in California. Lots of prospective subscribers feel that so many people have blocked their numbers that the service isn’t worth the $7 it costs each month.
I have to say that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. I’ve been using Caller ID for a decade, and seeing that a call is blocked just means you let the answering machine get a workout. Caller ID means I’m not afraid of my phone anymore. I don’t have to worry about missing the important call because I was talking to some bozo. It’s great for avoiding your no-account brother, stalkers and those incessant calls from editors. More information about every call, blocked or not, would be better, of course, and new Caller ID services are designed to let subscribers know who’s calling without giving away the phone number.
But most Californians disagree. And since California is the center of popular culture and California isn’t hip to Caller ID, neither is popular culture. It’s not as if Caller ID doesn’t show up at all in Hollywood’s products. It’s just unusual for the entertainment industry to acknowledge that the technology exists, apparently because most people in the industry have no idea how common it is outside California.
Why else would we still hear TV and movie cops urging, “Keep him on the phone for three minutes while we trace the line,” when that really isn’t how things are done anymore? In East Coast theaters, when something like that happens on screen, it’s not unusual for a heckler in the audience to say something like, “Or you could just hit Star 69,” a service that will sometimes redial whoever just called.
Clearly, Hollywood isn’t alone in this since lots of films--including “Along Came a Spider”--are based on books.
But it sure would be nice if an industry that slaps in street slang used by a tiny fraction of the population in the name of verisimilitude could at least pay lip service to a technology that almost half of us are using.
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Dave Wilson is The Times’ personal technology columnist.
