“Dial-a-gossip” popular

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32679, 7 August 1971, Page 7

“Dial-a-gossip” popular

(By

STELLA BRUCE)

I Every Monday morn- ! ing, after the children I have gone to school and | their husbands have left i for work, a group of I American housewives pour themselves another cup of coffee and settle down to a gossip. The only thing that makes it different to any other neighbourly chat is that one wife is in New York, another in Los Angeles, another in i Chicago. They are talking on the ! telephone, all connected into : a special switchboard which can take a dozen subscribers i at a time—a huge party line i for people who have never i met each other, who do not even know each other’s sur- ! names—but who have similar i interests in common. First devised just a year ago, the idea of “dialling-a- -' discussion” has swept through America and is now * catching on in Europe and other continents. “Fifty million telephones in America were being wasted in two-way conversations,” says Ron Richards, president of the pioneering communications company. Wherever the discussion groups are established, the system seems basically the same. A would-be member dials a central number and tells a receptionist what he or she wants to talk about. The new number is then assigned to a discussion group. Usually, once a week, the organisers call up the subscribers and connect them with the other group members. There is an hourly fee and long-distance callers must pay their own bills. Not all the discussion groups consist of lonely housewives anxious to kill time. One American organisation has plans to link doctors, politicians and scientists in weekly talk-ins designed to pass on new trends and developments. Already there are sessions for businessmen, advanced photographers, astronomers, wine connoisseurs and science Action enthusiasts. There is even a group who get together on the telephone once a week to chat about the days of the silent movies. ■ One typical session of a travel group involved long discussions about trips’ by freighter, cheap methods of 1 seeing Europe and cut-price ' air fares. Among the 12 people tak- 1 ing part was a banker, a ; translator of Russian, two 1 housewives, a dancer and a 1 retired civil servant. All knew 1 one another well, yet they' had never met, and could ' well have walked bv each :

. other in the street. t For housewives, the dis- . cussion sessions can be a ‘ godsend in time of crisis. t “It’s as if everyone had a ■ television set but there . weren’t any programmes.” . The scheme is, naturally, tailor-made for women—the > world’s most enthusiastic telephonists. And the regular phone sessions have pro- • gressed far beyond mere ' -long-distance gossip. One ! service, for example, pro- ' vides a cookery discussion, 1 presided over by a noted French chef. '■ Others involve child-care, 1 holiday and travel discus--1 sions, and talk-ins on garden--1 ing and home-decoration. In 1 New York, some services ' cater almost entirely for : home-tied wives, linking up a ’ dozen women on a 3000-mile ’ network usually once a week. Pessimists said the scheme ’ would never work—particu- ■ larly among women. Every- ' one would want to talk at 1 once, they said. The conversations will falter and peter ! out. ! As it happens, two people , seldom talk at once and ■ rarely interrupt each other. ‘ What is more, the discussions are as polite and 1 orderly as if the participants ■ were sitting around a table. ' At the early sessions a , compere was employed, but 1 this was soon found to be ‘ unnecessary. Now, most discussion services have “hosts" who monitor the discussions and cut in to redirect the conversation if it starts to wander off the subject. They also cut off cranks and undesirables. The conversations are surprisingly enjoyable and relaxed. Said one housewife who has been a member of a group for nearly a year: “We are doing advanced cookery and; by now, I feel I really know the people I talk to, although in, fact I only know their first names.” A wife who was having her husband’s boss to dinner and had panicked over what to cook, was able to get a complete menu, plus explicit cooking instructions, from her telephone friends. Of course there are drawbacks to dialling-a-gossip. The main one is price. A Chicago husband, horrified by his quarterly telephone bill, estimated that if the people his wife regularly talked to had gone to the most expensive restaurant and night club in Chicago at his expense, their conversation would have worked out cheaper than the chats that went on every week after he was safefy at work.— IfafttiirAc Tntarnßfinnfll.