I explained the relevance of mobile phones to you.

People are not always at home.

Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.

Now you don't really.

It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.

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lapcat an hour ago | parent [-]

I already responded to this point at length here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892375 but in brief: on this interpretation, mobile phones should actually result in more successful drop-bys, because you can call or text when you're "in the neighborhood". Thus, mobile phones are not an excuse to avoid home visits.

	▲	vidarh 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted and weren't wanted to the point that unwanted visits were a trope in media. Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.