THE SOCIAL NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY: THE TELEPHONE (PART II)

I203 Social and Organizational Issues of Information

Papers…

Don’t forget: First reading response due next Thursday (Feb 5th)

Assignment #1 and thinking about your paper topic

A Few Thoughts on Papers Topics!

Examples… Application of diffusion and social uses of technology in

a specific developing region Counter-arguments to traditional privacy concerns

(when is surveillance a good thing)? Applied to specific system such as Facebook,

others…. Investigation of competing ideologies in information

technology (i.e., open source movement)

Ultimately, the goal is to find a topic and actually propose an argument that you will defend through your investigation of the literature.

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Telephone as a Social Technology

…but you could also use the telephone to have personal conversations.

A real shift on the part of industry, users, and the technology itself.

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Social Etiquette

Hello…or Hoy, Hoy! Quite a debate over appropriate

way to answer phone calls. Servants versus “status equals”.

Call or write a letter? Phone viewed as impolite way to

ask someone to attend a party or event.

Early problems with F2F versus mediated communication.

The ‘telephone pledge’?

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Sociability

“When people can … chat comfortably with each other over some bit of gossip, every person will desire to put money in our pockets by having telephones.” -- Alexander Graham Bell (1878)

Yet this view not easily seen by the people who developed and grew the industry. “It is, of course, well understood that business

conversations cannot be limited as to time, but ‘visiting’ can beneficially be confined to a reasonably short duration of time” (1900 party-line etiquette)

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The first telemarketers

Already by 1934, charitable solicitations over the telephone becoming “nuisance”.

Used to organize varies social activities: church socials, meetings, etc.

Election campaigning (i.e., appeared in Palo Alto by about 1922).

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From ‘New Technology’ to Requirement As people relied more on the telephone, it became less of

a technical marvel and more of a base requirement for living in the modern social world.

1933, Willey and Rice note that telephone subscriptions increasing faster than phone calls.

As Fischer notes, similar to path of the automobile in America. From his arguments, it is clear that he believes that

history shows that the path happened despite beliefs and intentions of the phone companies themselves (not because of some uncanny ability to predict use)

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Localism and Technology

Localism: “…the extent to which the locality bounds,

delimits, or sets apart residents’ lives, including their work, personal relations, political involvement, and identity.”

“Impact of Technology”: The implication in most historical accounts

is that new technology (telephone, automobile, etc) have contributed to the loss of localism.

Localism Argument

Two primary components of most localism arguments:

1) local economies, personal relations, public attention, etc. ‘cohere’

2) there is a direct trade off between local involvements and non-local ones.

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But does the argument hold up? No doubt that localism did decline during the

20th century. Television allows us to watch without being there. Telephone allows us to talk to others without being

there. Automobile allows us to travel away from home.

But localism also enhanced or even increased by same things. If you are watching TV events, it keeps people at

home. Same for telephone. People still live in same areas (often longer than

previous generations).

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Evidence of decline in localism

Travel for out-of-town shopping did increase in 1900’s.

Travel for out-of-town events (i.e. sports) also increased in 1900’s.

Telephone made long-distance discussions possible, by definition moving focus away from ‘local’ community.

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…but observational evidence does not support the argument very well:

In-town events grew at almost same rate as out-of-town events.

The majority of telephone calls occur locally.

If people were increasingly less ‘local’, marriage should show this trend– but they do not (mixed evidence from Fischer’s study of Palo Alto, Antioch and San Rafael).

Newspapers also show mixed results– people did subscribe to bigger city papers (i.e. San Fran), but local papers still “held their own”.

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Changes to local life

The assumed displacement of local interests does not have substantial support.

There is consistent evidence, however, that there was augmentation of both local and extralocal activities.

Regarding celebrations/gatherings, the shift seems more like shift from public to private.

Regarding newspapers, the shift indicates more information as a whole (of larger world and local interests).