Landlines Set To Disappear
Landlines set to “disappear”? Don’t be silly
The gospel truth – or a staggering misuse of data? You decide.
Four years ago, journalist Nick Davies released a book that would turn the UK media world on its head. Called Flat Earth News, it exposed some of the more unsavoury habits of the UK press, most notably the practice of hacking into voicemail – a revelation which has led directly to the ongoing Leveson enquiry.
The book also made a point about wholesale duplication of press releases, presenting them as ‘news’. Use of less experienced journalists, a shortage of time to ‘dig out’ stories or check facts, and weaknesses in the editorial process led to chunks of PR being quoted or even used as the headline. Smart companies and their agencies recognised this gaping hole in the armour of the news desk, exploiting it relentlessly.
The message that those days are behind us doesn’t yet seem to have reached some parts of the IT press. “Landline telephones set to disappear from UK offices,” states the press release (LINK: http://www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk/News-and-events/News/Landline-telephones-set-to-disappear-from-UK-offices/) from Virgin Media Business. “Landlines to … disappear/be obsolete/become redundant,” repeat the headlines of a number of popular IT news titles. It’s not worth singling anyone out – you can Google for yourself and read the articles concerned, including their cut-and-paste quoting of Tony Grace, COO of Virgin Media Business.
Which would all be fine, of course, if the CIOs surveyed said any such thing – a fact which cannot be read directly from the 380-word press release. Sure, the headline says “landlines set to disappear” but the lead-in paragraph is more vague – 65% of those surveyed say that the landline will disappear “from everyday use.” Which, if I’m not mistaken, means a completely different thing.
Read a little further and we find the PC is similarly threatened – according to 62% of respondents. And (here’s the killer), “in contrast, smartphones (13 per cent) are seen as the least likely devices to be abandoned.” That’s all we have from the research, but it does beg the question – what precisely were the CIOs asked? If 65% of CIOs feel that landlines are going to become obsolete, do 13% also feel that smartphones will become a thing of the past between now and 2017?
This is unlikely, just as it is unlikely that those surveyed will be ripping out their desk phones. Indeed, from the text we have, nobody actually said that – the key phrase is “everyday use”. Ask me a question about the device that I’m going to use for the majority of calls, and I’ll probably say my mobile. Ask me whether I would dispense with an office landline entirely, given potential issues of coverage, call quality and so on, and I would hedge my bets.
In the alternative universe where journalists didn’t simply quote press releases verbatim, we might have ended up with some more reasoned debate about the role of desk phones versus mobile phones, the relative advantages, the need for integration between the two and so on. But we don’t. And as long as we don’t, we will be fed a diet of hyperbolic statements that bear little resemblance to the world around us.