The Telephone in America: A Cultural History of Instant Connection

FAIN: FEL-273428-21

Josh C. Lauer
University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH 03824-2620)

Research and writing a book on the history and proliferation of the telephone and how it transformed modern societies, from Alexander Graham Bell to the present.

Though the early history of the telephone is well documented and the rise of mobile communication after 1990 has attracted intense scholarly interest, we know surprisingly little about how the telephone shaped American society during the twentieth century. How did the proliferation of telephones – in offices and stores, in homes and on streets – change the way Americans thought of personal communication? How did it redefine their sense of time and place, work and leisure, connection and privacy? These questions are historical, but their answers illuminate the predicaments of twenty-first-century digital life. While providing a comprehensive cultural history of the telephone in America, this book project excavates the origins and development of today’s always-on, always-connected condition, drawing attention to the telephone’s compensatory function as a technological antidote to the shocks and dislocations of modernity.

Associated Products

Visualizing Black Telephone Users: Technological Whiteness and Racial Exclusion in Bell System Advertising (Article)
Title: Visualizing Black Telephone Users: Technological Whiteness and Racial Exclusion in Bell System Advertising
Author: Josh Lauer
Abstract: This study considers the broad implications of white technological modernity as a mode of symbolic and systemic exclusion. The visual absence of Black telephone users in mass market advertising -- and the struggle to make them visible --underscores the exclusionary power of technological whiteness and its lasting effects on conceptions of Black technology users, communities, and innovation. During the first half of the twentieth century, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) tirelessly promoted its national telephone network as a model of technological progress and universal service, but this vision did not include African Americans. This article examines the historical exclusion of African Americans in Bell System advertising and the emergence of Black telephone users in advertising imagery during the 1950s and 1960s, drawing attention to the civil rights work of Ramon S. Scruggs, the first African American to rise to Bell System senior management.
Year: 2024
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Technology and Culture
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

When Telephone Operators were Accountants: The Commodification of Talk During the Early Years of American Telephony (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: When Telephone Operators were Accountants: The Commodification of Talk During the Early Years of American Telephony
Author: Josh Lauer
Abstract: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of telephone operators in the United States, mostly young women, performed the frenzied, repetitive manual labor of connecting telephone calls. The physical and emotional labor of telephone operators has been well documented by historians of technology and business. In addition to handling complex switchboards and speaking with callers, however, many telephone operators performed a third form of labor: documenting calls for the purpose of billing. Telephone operators were not only human “switches,” as Kenneth Lipartito memorably observed; they were also accountants. This paper addresses the historical development of telephone recordkeeping and metering practices in the United States during the early decades of commercial telephony. While the telephone’s technological achievement inspired fascination, early public interest in the telephone, as Richard R. John has noted, often revolved around a more prosaic issue: its cost. Unlike most products and services, whose costs are reduced by economies of scale, the cost of telephone calls increased as the number of connections grew exponentially, requiring more operators and more elaborate switching equipment to complete them. While many telephone companies charged subscribers a flat fee for local calling, non-local, long-distance, and pay station calls involved tolls. To collect tolls, operators had to identify callers, document the time, date, and destination of calls, record their duration, and apply appropriate rate schedules. This, in turn, entailed complex recordkeeping practices. Drawing upon early industry accounts and archival sources in AT&T and Southern New England Telephone Company records, this paper examines the work of accounting for telephone talk prior to its semi-automation. While documenting these procedures, this paper considers the larger historical and cultural implications of commodifying an elemental form of human interaction: talk.
Date: 03/18/2023
Conference Name: Business History Conference

The Telephone Answering Machine: Mediated Presence and the Participatory Condition. (Article)
Title: The Telephone Answering Machine: Mediated Presence and the Participatory Condition.
Author: Josh Lauer
Abstract: During the 1970s and 1980s, telephone answering machines became widely available in the United States. Their use immediately disrupted long-established patterns of interpersonal communication and self-presentation. While solving the temporal limitations and lopsided power of telephone calls, answering machines introduced a range of new techno-social problems. Significantly, they required callers to interact with a machine instead of a human being. The history of the household answering machine provides insight into how telephone users were habituated to changing communication norms during the closing decades of the 20th century. This study examines cultural responses to the answering machine during the 1970s and 1980s, drawing attention to the following three key themes: the perils of perpetual contact, mediated performances, and social surveillance. These themes would shape understandings of digital mediation and become defining characteristics of an emergent “participatory condition.”
Year: 2023
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New Media & Society
Publisher: Sage

---