Considerations for the careful handling of my still functional Nokia E72
I tried to see if my old Nokia E72 still works. After I charged it a bit, this was the case immediately; I didn’t even have to think about the PIN.
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I owned the device since 2010 and used it until 2015 when I bought an iPhone. The phone was already internet-capable, but I actually used it like a particularly powerful normal cell phone, particularly powerful because it could store so many SMS messages and you could store them in different folders. Most of them are stored in the folder with text messages from my parents (603).
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Reading the text message completely absorbed me for at least an hour, I finally forced myself to turn off the phone because I was emotionally overwhelmed with this trip down memory lane. And that even though I only kept funny text messages (from the friend who wrote me “2013, année erotique” at 12:13 or so on New Year’s Day 2013; from my father who tells me about a visit to a café in Basel “ City full of anti-social fuck prices”) or loving messages (from my mother, who asks what I want to eat when I arrive, who encourages me to get through the day well and wishes me a good seminar; from the friends who wish me that may this damned heartache go away soon). The good news is the only reason I kept the phone at all – because I couldn’t find a way to transfer all those text messages to another active device, to a storage medium in use. My Nokia E72 is a love medium, you might say in a media studies text, but this isn’t one.
The media science truism that text (regardless of the medium) can potentially remember what happened much better than a human brain (and is also potentially immortal, unlike an organically existing memory), but is also evident here. I find several messages from a woman with a common name (roughly “Claudia Müller”) who I apparently knew around 2013. She thanks you for meeting, invites you to brunch in a text message to apparently several addresses, etc. It’s not many text messages, but enough to assume that you’re an acquaintance. And I no longer have any idea who this woman is, why our acquaintance ended, how it began – the news is too general and with too few data points. Was it the ex-girlfriend of an acquaintance who I met again last year after a long time at the Germanists’ Day? Possible, but there is also something to be said against it. It makes me uneasy to have no memory of people who were apparently friendly enough to invite me to brunches, about whom my brain no longer wants to know anything, and to be unable to trigger them through tentative association and forced digging. I recently praised myself again for my good memory when I remembered how annoyed some of my friends were when I could always produce the year of purchase and event for all of my clothes and all sorts of events – I confessed to myself but also that I usually know the year because I associate it with knowledge of my mental health and separations.
It might also be correct to correct or at least expand the description of the telephone as a “love medium” and say: It is a sentimental medium. Many of the messages on it came from a friend who unfriended me at the beginning of 2016. When I read her very funny and caring messages, I felt very sad about it all over again and wondered if I could have prevented this breakup. At the time, she complained, among other things, that I checked my emails from my iPhone, which was still very new at the time, too often in her presence. She was right in her criticism; giving in to the fascination of the device and waiting for messages “from him” that never came or hurt me was a bad habit. That wasn’t the reason for the end of the friendship, which is still intact on the old phone.
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Example of an innocuous message from an ongoing friendship
The biggest striking thing about Messages, compared to everything that happens in all messengers on the iPhone, is the absence of emojis, stickers and GIFs. Even the most playful messages take on an almost official feel thanks to the phone’s black on a subtle light gray background and seem much more adult than the squeaks in white text on a blue or green background in iMessage or the two-tick blobby stickers and cat GIFs in Signal or Telegram. Many of the messages from back then are also difficult to understand because a large part of my own text messages are missing; The device only ever saved 100. What’s more, the SMS sent are collected in a separate folder and sorted chronologically as individual messages, not as conversations with the numbers addressed. The conversations that I can read are therefore one-sided, unless I laboriously select the respective one from the approximately 2,000 SMS messages that are sorted into folders sorted by sender groups (e.g. “Boys”, “Nina”, “Mom and Dad”) Fumbling out the answer counterpart: I gather from a sequence of three messages from a friend that we were texting each other while we were watching Tatort at the same time. Reactions from several people (“SEPSIS! Just the word”) make it clear that I spread the consequences of a torn fingernail with a contaminated wound widely among my circle of friends (it was also spectacular, just like in the one story by Michel from Lönneberga: A A red line slowly crawled up the inside of my forearm and the doctor’s assistant started shouting loudly when I brought this up at the counter with an innocent expression). I haven’t thought about that in a while, but the details are coming back to me. Dr. Steinhaus on Geygerstrasse, who treated me very well at that time and in several other cases, died only two or three years later. Unfortunately, this is no longer in my phone.
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I’ve now put the device back in the drawer of my bedside table and won’t be taking it out again any time soon. I will continue to think about the dosage of memory and its media elsewhere.
(Hanna Engelmeier)