The telephone was invented by somebody or other (I’ll save that can of worms for another day) in 1876. For the next decade or so it remained a tool of business and a privilege of the wealthy. But in the 1890s, legal and technological changes made the mass diffusion of telephony possible. Telephone use exploded. The number of phones in North America shot from the thousands to the millions. Tens of thousands of little companies sprang up to meet, and stoke, the demand. The rhetoric of the 1890s boom was all techno-utopian populism. The new telecom entrepreneurs were at once idealistic and opportunistic young techies. They saw few contradictions between smashing the old Bell and Western Union monopolies, liberating the people, and getting crazy rich. Is any of this sounding familiar? Municipal governments also got active in the telephone boom, especially in the Midwest. And it’s in states like Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, where municipal governments were most active and the Bell companies were not, that we see the most telephones per capita by 1900, the most anti-Bell sentiment, and the highest frequency of telephone use. These states also had the most rural and working-class people using telephones, and often the most women. And they are where you’d find the most vibrant expression of a new participatory telephone culture, one marked by locally owned and oriented networks, by social and indeed frivolous use of the telephone, by experimentation and innovation among users as well as producers, and by communal practices like eavesdropping and rural party lines. Call it Telephone 2.0 if you like. In my book I call it what contemporaries called it: the people’s telephone. But here is the twist in the tale, and the thing that spoils so many swell “yay for the future” books I otherwise want to love. Between 1904 and 1908, give or take, the Bell System got its shit together. And over the next ten to twenty years, as AT&T took control of American telephony, that vibrant, participatory, frivolous, local, social telephone culture mostly went away. It wasn’t just a matter of ten thousand little telephone systems selling out or going bankrupt, though that definitely cast a pall. State and federal regulation ended municipal engagement with the telephone and entrenched the AT&T monopoly. Billing structures and protocols of polite behavior changed to define and suppress “misuse” and “overuse” of the wires. The autonomy of Bell’s own operating companies, once a key source of local variation and innovation, was curtailed to meet the alleged demands of long distance service. Private lines replaced party lines and operators replaced dial phones (no, I don’t have that backwards), which represented a significant shift in control from the community back to the corporation. Telephone 2.0 was replaced by Telephone 1.0. In light of the SOPA & PIPA protests, I’m sharing and old blog post called The Gilded Age Internet and the People’s Telephone.  The lesson here is that “it has happened before” where corporate interests have been able to suppress technological gains and popular expression for their own gain.  Wednesday Jan 18 04:34pm 2 notes
tagged as: oldisthenewnew.



Source: robmacdougall.org