By Claude S. Fischer
The phone looms huge in our lives, as ever found in smooth societies as automobiles and tv. Claude Fischer provides the 1st social background of this important yet little-studied technology--how we encountered, confirmed, and eventually embraced it with enthusiasm. utilizing phone advertisements, oral histories, mobile correspondence, and statistical information, Fischer's paintings is a colourful exploration of the way, whilst, and why american citizens begun speaking during this greatly new manner.Studying 3 California groups, Fischer uncovers how the phone grew to become built-in into the personal worlds and neighborhood actions of standard americans within the first many years of this century. ladies have been in particular avid of their use, a phenomenon which the first vigorously discouraged after which later wholeheartedly promoted. time and again Fischer unearths that the phone supported a wide-ranging community of social kinfolk and performed an important function in neighborhood existence, in particular for girls, from organizing kid's relationships and church actions to assuaging the loneliness and tedium of rural life.Deftly written and meticulously researched, the United States Calling provides a massive new bankruptcy to the social heritage of our country and illuminates a primary point of cultural modernism that's quintessential to modern lifestyles.
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Additional info for America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940
Sample text
He defines modern technology as "the typical way in which one in the modern era takes up with reality," a truly global definition. Borgmann then distinguishes modern (1700 to now) devices from largely premodern focal things. Things are objects whose operations we understand and that can "center and illuminate our lives"like fireplaces, violins, and national parks. They are good. Devices are objects whose internal workings are mysteries and that merely deliver some end to uslike central heating, stereos, and motor homes.
Mechanical properties do not predestine the development and employment of an innovation. Instead, struggles and negotiations among interested 52 53 parties shape that history. Inventors, investors, competitors, organized customers, agencies of government, the media, and others conflict over how an innovation will develop. The outcome is a particular definition and a structure for the new technology, perhaps even a "reinvention" of the device. The story could always have been otherwise if the struggles had proceeded differently.
Translated by James Strachey, Norton edition, 1962, p. 35).  < previous page < previous page page_15 page_150 next page > next page > Page 150 Figure 12.  Those other adults who supported telephone subscription were disproportionately women. adults, not adult earners, who seemed to matter. ) At least two important implications follow. First, the finding about adults implies that the more people in a household, the more reason to call. This simple point suggests, in turn, that telephone diffusion was driven by demand, rather than solely by marketing.