Släktbloggen

...which I believe she had, I guess it looked something like this. So how did she answer it? Well, for sure she didn't say: "Hi dude, what's up?" And I guess the text messages were quite a few.

It's interesting to see how the telephone culture has changed only during my lifetime. In the 70s there were (in Sweden) three polite ways of answering the telephone. By saying your phone number, saying your last name or saying your first and last name. Not just "hello" which is very common in many other countries.

But at some time in the late 80s something changed: people in my own generation started to answer with their first names only. All my cousins i Stockholm did and soon I did it as well. Suddenly it was considered formal to use your last name when it wasn't necessary. And in the mid-90s the older generations started to follow the trend. For example my grandmother, who was very modern, answered the telephone (the last two-three years of her life) by only saying "Brita". When cultural changes occur, the informal seems to win over the formal.

The cell phone culture that we live in today, either we like it or not, has been commented by the Swedish writer and director Peter Dalle. Imagine, he said, that the SMS function had been invented before it was possible to hear the other person's voice. Then, when this became possible, people would have said: "What a progress!"