Children and young people's telephone use and telephone cultures in Britain c. 1984-1999
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Southampton
Department Name: Sch of Humanities
Abstract
The shift in young people's use of telephones from one-to-one voice communication to written and visual communication through texting and engagement with social media represents a pivotal cultural development. While the potentially harmful effects on young people of excessive mobile phone use continue to be studied, the COVID-19 emergency is emphasising further the importance of telephone technologies as tools for young people's social connection, education and skills development. These developments in young people's distanced communication have a vital, yet largely unstudied, history. My research is the first study of young people's telephone use in modern Britain, covering the period c.1984-1999. Through combining archival research, oral history research and research with community participants and in contemporary youth contexts, I investigate young people's access (and restrictions) to using telephones in this era, incorporating the landline, public telephone and mobile phone. I examine the significance of telephones in diverse facets of young people's lives, including in play cultures; leisure; the construction of home; mediation of family life and friendships; the assertion of fashionable identities; as an educational tool; in the workplace; and for locating advice and help. In doing so, I trace how young people's telephone use has been historically at the heart of debates over the meanings of privacy, protection, dependency, and social inequality.
Young people's current-day phone use is analysed typically as an expression of individualisation. I ask what this illuminates and overlooks about the historical connection between telephony and children and young people's empowerment; their negotiation of family and community surveillance; their socialisation; and construction of selfhood. These connections evolved particularly rapidly in the years between 1984 and 1999, linked to changes in the marketization of the UK telecommunications sector; the rise of mobile phone ownership; and new ethical formulations of children's and young people's rights. Potentially unmediated by adults, telephone use was mobilised by the media, state and market in this era as a tool for young people's self-expression and social participation. This research centres children's own experiences and feelings in its analysis, moving between examples as varied as five-year-olds learning how to dial '999' and telephone providers' advertisements encouraging teenage boys to talk to their girlfriends. Tracing contestations between corporately-prescribed messages; those constructed in the media and popular culture; and informal ('everyday') education, I examine young people's telephone use in the 1980s/90s as both an activity in itself and its contribution to identity formation.
The value of this research extends beyond historical scholarship. The Fellowship enables deeper understandings of the affective, cultural, and social impact of young people's telephone use upon modern debates about the relationship between telephones and young people's wellbeing and safety. I am collaborating with BT Heritage & Archives and the John Hansard Gallery, and the project combines historical research and co-research with community groups and young people in three strands: i) archival research in local and national collections, and research in cultural and media sources, to recover historical voices of children in relation to telephone use across diverse settings; ii) oral history research, collecting adults' childhood memories about their experiences using telephones; and iii) co-research using arts practice in contemporary youth settings, and crowd-sourced research using digital humanities methods to create an interactive online map of young people's 'phone spaces' in Southampton since the 1980s. The map is a pilot-study for a planned UK-wide project mapping where, when and how young people have used telephones, to be conducted after the Fellowship.
Young people's current-day phone use is analysed typically as an expression of individualisation. I ask what this illuminates and overlooks about the historical connection between telephony and children and young people's empowerment; their negotiation of family and community surveillance; their socialisation; and construction of selfhood. These connections evolved particularly rapidly in the years between 1984 and 1999, linked to changes in the marketization of the UK telecommunications sector; the rise of mobile phone ownership; and new ethical formulations of children's and young people's rights. Potentially unmediated by adults, telephone use was mobilised by the media, state and market in this era as a tool for young people's self-expression and social participation. This research centres children's own experiences and feelings in its analysis, moving between examples as varied as five-year-olds learning how to dial '999' and telephone providers' advertisements encouraging teenage boys to talk to their girlfriends. Tracing contestations between corporately-prescribed messages; those constructed in the media and popular culture; and informal ('everyday') education, I examine young people's telephone use in the 1980s/90s as both an activity in itself and its contribution to identity formation.
The value of this research extends beyond historical scholarship. The Fellowship enables deeper understandings of the affective, cultural, and social impact of young people's telephone use upon modern debates about the relationship between telephones and young people's wellbeing and safety. I am collaborating with BT Heritage & Archives and the John Hansard Gallery, and the project combines historical research and co-research with community groups and young people in three strands: i) archival research in local and national collections, and research in cultural and media sources, to recover historical voices of children in relation to telephone use across diverse settings; ii) oral history research, collecting adults' childhood memories about their experiences using telephones; and iii) co-research using arts practice in contemporary youth settings, and crowd-sourced research using digital humanities methods to create an interactive online map of young people's 'phone spaces' in Southampton since the 1980s. The map is a pilot-study for a planned UK-wide project mapping where, when and how young people have used telephones, to be conducted after the Fellowship.
Publications
| Title | Dial-up: Community Exhibition, Southampton |
| Description | We employed an artist-educator to facilitate a ten-week workshop series, enabling young people in Southampton to engage with research undertaken by the project team. The young artists created a range of visual materials (using photography, collage, and creative writing) in response to the research resources, and designed an exhibition re-imagining the phone and its impact on young people. The exhibition was curated and shown at John Hansard Gallery and was free to the general public. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | The exhibition encouraged discussion around the narratives and images associated with young people and telephones since the 1980s, and allowed the young people who had created the outputs to value their own reflections upon their experiences. |
| URL | https://jhg.art/events/the-telephonic-trio-dial-up/ |
| Title | Thinking inside the box: Community exhibition, Southampton |
| Description | We worked with a local not-for-profit art gallery to present an exhibition curating oral history research undertaken on the project and artworks produced by the young artists who had taken part in the project's arts workshop series for 14-19 year-olds. The exhibition was free to the general public and situated in Southampton. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | The exhibition contributed to the advancement of the local arts/cultural environment in Southampton and offered us the opportunity to reflect on public discussion of the research narratives in a creative setting within the wider community. |
| URL | http://k6gallery.com/exhibitions/thinking-inside-the-box |
| Description | Historical alignments between telephony and children and young people are under-researched. Addressing an understudied period of transition in modern telephony (1984-1999), our research across UK archives, interviews and engaged research, has demonstrated that telephone use has been central to children's and young people's family relationships, friendships and selfhood in the late twentieth century. While children were targeted directly as telephone users by businesses and children's organisations in the period, our research reveals that telephone use and telephone cultures were experienced unequally by children and young people navigating diverse contexts of shared access to, as well as ownership of, telephones. The research has generated new understanding on how memories of children's telephone use illuminate the wider history of childhood, history of youth culture, the history of the family, and history of technology in the late twentieth century. The Fellowship has created a collection of new oral history interviews and a dataset of memories shared on our digital map (datasets will be finalised following the conclusion of the award). These memories have nuanced established frameworks of understanding. Our research reveals that children's telephone use was experienced unequally by children across lines of class, age, gender, regional identity, and ability, as much as it was framed in generational terms (in distinction to adults' practices). Our findings show that technological change was experienced by children as part of personal or family opportunities, as much as through the framework of cultural shifts. Specifically new methods of research were developed by the research team through the innovation of crowd-sourced research methods that capture memories of childhood telephone use through digital mapping. This approach involved developing research practices and ethics around social media methods for engaged research that allowed for data gathering through the varied terms with which people chose to engage with the project. Originally planned as a pilot project focused upon data collection in the area of Southampton, we expanded our digital memory collection to a UK-wide scope, and augmented the online memory collection methods to include in-person memory collection methods. The project website (https://telephonicyouth.co.uk), on which the digital map is hosted, is a free resource for members of the public that shares these new techniques, alongside new knowledge generated across all strands of the research, including an online exhibition produced in collaboration with our project partner, BT Group Archives. Our research has demonstrated the value of using mixed methodologies that bring together co-creation and participatory methods and academic research for more granular understandings of children's histories. Our arts engaged research methods, developed through collaboration with John Hansard Gallery across 5 family arts workshops, and a ten-week workshop series with young people, showed the value of undertaking academic research alongside community engagement. It allowed for significant knowledge exchange within the project partnership, and has enriched the range and forms of inter-generational knowledge about children's telephone cultures that has been generated. |
| Exploitation Route | We have shared outcomes from the arts engaged research with families and young people with arts, gallery and engagement professionals via a Blog published on ENGAGE's website, jointly written by Project Investigator, Eve Colpus and Lynne Dick, Head of Engagement at John Hansard Gallery. The Blog evaluates our collaborative approach towards concurrent academic research and arts-led community engagement and offers learning points for professionals undertaking collaborative engagement in similar settings. This evaluation has been used within training events in academia, and we will review opportunities to extend our reflective conclusions amongst gallery education professionals. Colpus is sharing the outcomes of research within BT's collections with BT Group Archives. This provides a new distillation of materials about children's histories in the 1980s and 1990s within the collections that have been unexplored to date. The findings are extending knowledge amongst the Archive team about children and the heritage of BT, which can be used to support future researchers' scholarship. Colpus' chapter, 'Claiming and curating experiential expertise at the children's telephone helpline, ChildLine UK, 1986-2006' (2025) has the potential to contribute to discussions amongst policy-makers around historical examples of children's telephone cultures in children's engagement with organisational practices. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://telephonicyouth.co.uk |
| Description | During the award's lifetime, research findings were used as part of the concurrent research and arts-led engagement strand in family arts workshops and in a 5 month arts workshop programme with a group of young people. The work extended links between the University of Southampton and cultural communities within the city of Southampton, and resulted in two free public exhibitions in the city: 'Thinking inside the box', K6 Gallery, 6 May-25 September 2022, and 'Dial-up', a community exhibition in John Hansard Gallery, 6 April-7 May 2022 ('Dial-up' reached 1357 visitors). The exhibitions generated impact at a personal level for visitors, and evaluative comments reflected upon shifts between historical and contemporary telephone communication and young people's perception of telephones as a means of connection. The impact with young people through the arts workshop programme (November 2021-March 2022) was on a modest scale during the lifetime of the award. This reflected challenges in recruitment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted outreach with some key local partners. However, the engagement in a small group of young people allowed for key impact upon individual young people's skills development, and in 2023 all participants completed the Bronze Arts Award qualification. Our case-study, 'Telephonic Youth: arts engagement with research strand (2021-24)', published on ENGAGE's website in October 2024 as part of its 'sharing practice case-studies' series is contributing to ongoing discussions in gallery education practice. We will continue to talk to our project partners as they take forward reflections on the collaboration with respect to their own developing practice. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
| Sector | Creative Economy |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | Partnership with BT Group Archives |
| Organisation | BT Group |
| Department | BT Archives |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | We worked with BT Group Archives to uncover under-researched areas of BT's archival collection focusing on children and young people's telephone use, and to better understand ways of engaging the collection with new audiences, specifically children and families. |
| Collaborator Contribution | BT Group Archives are providing specialist expertise in developing research data for curation and are also facilitating conversations amongst cultural and heritage organisations at a national level. BT have contributed to building awareness of the project through its social channels. |
| Impact | Display at One Braham, BT Group Headquarters; Display at Engagement Weekend at Amberley Museum; Online exhibition on project website. These outcomes have opened up BT Group Archives' collections in relation to the history of children to the wider business, family audiences and the general public through in-person and digital engagement. |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Partnership with John Hansard Gallery |
| Organisation | University of Southampton |
| Department | John Hansard Gallery |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | We worked with John Hansard Gallery to support understanding of engaged research methods and research governance, which is providing new insight into how the gallery could collaborate with academic partners in the future. |
| Collaborator Contribution | John Hansard Gallery has worked as a regional hub for the arts strand on the project, introduced us to organisations working with young people and arts programmes regionally, and helped to build awareness of the project with regional and national audiences via its digital media presence. |
| Impact | Telephonic Youth Space to Create! workshops; Telephonic Youth Art Workshops with 14-19-year-olds; and Community exhibition. These activities were multi-disciplinary in nature, and used arts methods and practice to support participants' engagement with historical content. |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Display at One Braham, BT Group Headquarters |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | We worked with BT Group Archives to develop the display, 'Growing up with BT on the phone'. The display showcased our collaborative research in BT's archival collections to interpret BT's marketing and educational approaches towards child and adolescent telephone users in the 1980s and 1990s. 50 people attended the opening event of the display, which was open to BT Group staff and stakeholders at BT Group's headquarters for a month. The event raised awareness of areas of BT's history that BT Group staff were not aware of and increased awareness of the Archive as a place for BT Group staff members to visit and use in their own work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Interactive exhibit at Hands-On Humanities Day, University of Southampton |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Members of the project team and student volunteers set up a stall on the University of Southampton's Avenue Campus as part of the Southampton Arts and Humanities Festival (20 November 2021). The stall combined tactile and interactive activities for an inter-generational audience and the opportunity for those aged over 16 to share memories on the project website as part of the crowd-sourced research. The event was useful in reaching a wider public audience and generated significant research data. It was also a very useful learning process for the research team in recognising that participants' interpretations of our research interests are shaped by their own experiences, i.e. a number of submissions were linked to non-UK locations despite the UK focus of engagement materials. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Interactive exhibit at Science and Engineering Day, University of Southampton |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Adults and children who bought tickets for Science and Engineering Day, part of the University of Southampton's Science and Engineering Festival (2022), took part in this drop-in activity, held on the University of Southampton's campus. The exhibit combined interactive activities for an inter-generational audience, allowing us to reflect further on children's and families' engagement with our research questions, and activities for our crowd-sourced research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Pop up stalls in local libraries |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | In 2022, members of the research team ran a series of pop-up stalls at local libraries across Southampton. Building on the successful format used in the project's exhibit at the Southampton Arts and Humanities Festival, the stalls used interactive activities aimed at children and family audiences and offered the opportunity for those aged over 16 to contribute to the crowd-sourced research via the project's website. The events have generated research data, and have also been very useful in widening the project's connections within the local community. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Sharing practice case-study on ENGAGE's website |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project Investigator, Eve Colpus and Lynne Dick, Head of Engagement at John Hansard Gallery co-wrote the reflective report, 'Telephonic Youth: arts engagement with research strand (2021-24)', which was published in October 2024 as part of the online resources provided by ENGAGE, a UK charity promoting engagement and participation in the visual arts. The case-study evaluated our collaboration in arts engagement research on the award, including in the family-friendly workshops and arts workshop programme with young people. As of 10 March 2025 the webpage had received 76 visits. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024,2025 |
| URL | https://engage.org/resources/telephonic-youth-arts-engagement-with-research-strand-2021-24/ |
| Description | Telephonic Youth Art Workshops with 14-19 year olds |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | We commissioned an artist-educator to run a creative workshops programme with a group of 14-19-year-olds living in Southampton, responding to research materials identified by the PI Eve Colpus on the project. The programme included 10 2-hour workshops, which ran from November 2021 to March 2022, and was led by the artist-educator in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery Engagement Team members and PI, Eve Colpus. The workshop activities were designed in conversation with the young people and in response to their particular interests, and included photography activities, creative writing and zine-making tasks. The workshops also embedded discussion activities around themes such as the differences and similarities between young people's phone use in the 1980s and 1990s and today, the spaces in which young people use phones, and what a phone is, as well as how research data is generated. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| URL | https://jhg.art/resources/ |
| Description | Telephonic Youth Space to Create! workshops |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Five family-friendly creative workshops were led by a professional artist, in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery Engagement Team and members of the research team. The workshops were run in-person at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, as part of the Gallery's free Space to Create! programme. Each workshop used a different creative activity to encourage engagement with research themes and materials, including mono-printing, collage, cyanotype printing, and an audio creation workshop. The workshops generated local interest in the research, and, as the audience was comprised of families, the activities prompted inter-generational discussions around the heritage of telephones and communication practices. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Telephonic Youth display at Amberley Museum's 1980s Weekend |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Over 150 adults and children engaged with our display which was run in partnership with BT Group Archives for Amberley Museum's '1980s Weekend', 27-28 July 2024. We showcased part of the exhibition that we had shown at BT Group Headquarters in June-July 2024 alongside old telephone handsets and telephone directories from the period, and children's activities. The event showed the value of using material artefacts creatively for generating significant inter-generational engagement, and was a way of bringing accessible parts of BT's historical collections to family audiences. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Telephonic Youth website |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | In August 2021, the research team launched their project website https://telephonicyouth.co.uk/ which is used to (1) collect and make available memories submitted by members of the public; (2) publish news posts about the project; and (3) publish other public-facing outputs including an online exhibition showcasing research in BT Group Archives' collections. The website was developed by boxChilli and has been approved through institutional ethics and research integrity processes. The website has received high levels of traffic. As of 28 February 2025 it had received around 16000 visits since it launch, and has an average of 340 unique visits per month. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022,2023,2024,2025 |
| URL | https://telephonicyouth.co.uk/ |
| Description | Telephonic Youth: Thinking about phones past, present and future: Community Takeover activity |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Over 130 members of the general public attended our drop-in activities, run as part of John Hansard Gallery's Community Takeover programme for 2022. We designed activities including a creative archive-making activity (where people left behind phone memories) and an opportunity for object recycling. The activities extended our research questions to incorporate global stories of young people's phone use, and also in relation to the Community Takeover theme of sustainability. The sustainability and recycling element was undertaken with the support of other academics, with whom John Hansard Gallery connected us. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://jhg.art/events/community-takeover-2022/ |