Hacker Cinema
Scream 2
1997 · Film · 120 min
Part of Scream Collection
Directed by Wes Craven
Two years after the Woodsboro murders, Sidney Prescott acclimates to college life while someone donning the Ghostface costume begins a new string of killings.
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Article claims that the 1995 No Doubt song, Spiderwebs, references Caller ID. Clearly, the song is about an implausible excuse recorded as an outgoing answering machine message, not Caller ID. "I'm walking into spider webs. Leave a message, and I'll call you back."
For the youngsters, an answering machine was the precursor technology to voice mail. It was a hardware device that you installed on a landline--the only kind of phone line most people had--between the demarcation point and your phone handset, that automatically answered a phone call after a programmed number of rings. The machine then played the outgoing message, sounded a beep, and recorded the subsequent audio as an incoming message. The machine could be set to play the incoming audio through a speaker, and if the call was from a familiar source, the phone handset could then be picked up. This was referred to as "screening your calls".
Equally clearly, the superior cultural documentation for Caller ID is the Scream movies. Scream came out in 1996, and Scream 2 in 1997. Sydney did not have Caller ID in the first, and had purchased it by the second, to combat crank callers. After the release of Scream, Caller ID use tripled in the US. (That may be coincidental, attributable to the adoption rate of a new and useful technology.)