Telephone companies complained about frivolous use of telephones and told their users to be businesslike. Their machines were, after all, important. Not until the 1920s did the telephone companies catch on to what people really wanted from this wonderful machine. They wanted to be drawn into a kind of living tether with one another. And today, even in business, that's how we use telephones.
Telephones unite our scattered families and keep friendships alive.
Oddly enough, Alexander Graham Bell himself predicted the social use of the telephone, but its early makers and users didn't see it that way. It used to bother me that, up to the day he died, my father never could relax and chat with me on a long-distance telephone call. It took the next generation to see that the inherent use of the telephone was social. Our tools teach us. They drive our minds and evolve their own roles in our lives.