Carrie's Notes from the book,

America Calling

by sociologist Claude Fischer at Berkeley

(he will be working with the telembodiment robotics people in computer science there)

He wanted to study "a technology that people used in daily private life, a technology that may have affected social relations, community and culture."

"point-to-point, space-transcending technologies, such as the railroad, automobile, telephone and streetcar."

has the ability to travel and speak across space changed fundamentally between 150 and 1950..."

To classical sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, "the multiplication and extension of interpersonal contacts were crucial to the development of modern society."

The introduction of the telephone

the uses to which people put it

its evolving social role in daily life

1.) Has the telephone expanded or diminished personal relations?

enriched social ties

allowed rural people to overcome isolation

or

Stephen Kern, "It brought people into close contact but obliged them to 'live at wider distances' and created a palpable emptiness across which voices seemed uniquely disembodied and remote." p. 25

Fischer: it may be "an impersonal instrument whose use spreads impersonality."

2.) Does the telephone weaken local ties in favor of extralocal contacts and national interests?

3.) What were its subtle social psychological character?

permits intrusion into privacy

need public spaces less often and disengage

leaves people on edge always ready to be interrupted

provides a sense of calm security

unsettles customary ways of dividing home and public settings

"Initially, Alexander Graham Bell and his associated devoted their efforts largely to devising every possible means of bringing the telephone to the public's attention." p. 61

"They often unveiled the device in flamboyant demonstrations, usually involving the broadcast of music and speeches from one place to an audience in another."

First had to go into a city and tell inhabitants wht the telephone (talkaphone) was -- "educating the public."

then persuade people to pay for it

Sidney Aronson (sociologist) pointed out that Bell and his backers needed to convince investors that their invention was not a toy. They first suggested that "subscribers could use it to talk between two fixed points, such as a house and a stable or a front office and a workshop." p. 65

"Later they promoted the telephone as a replacement for the telegraph, allowing business messages to be sent more easily without an operator."

"in its earliest years, the industry paid only scant attention to marketing residential service." p. 67

initally billed as a help in household management, and not for personal conversations.

Telephone marketers faced a need to educate people on what phones could do and how to use them.

"A Canadian notice in 1896 instructed:

To Listen: Place the telephone fairly against the ear, with an upward motion, so that the lower extremity or lobe of te ear is gathered in, into the cavity of the telephone; in this position it will be found to fit snugly and comfortably-- the lobe of the ear acting as a cushion and at the same time closing out all ulterior sounds, thus enabling the voice to be heard with clearness and precision." p. 70

struggle of phone companies to civilize and educate their customers...

Early on, AT&T tried to stop people from saying "Hello," which they considered vulgar, advising instead that one begin by identifying oneself and stating you they are calling...

Comfort and convenience, sociability 1920s and 30s

"early telephone men often fought their residential customers over social conversations, labeling such calls as frivolous and unnecessary. For example, a company announcement from 1881 complained, "The fact that subscribers have been free to use the wires as they pleased without incurring additional expense [i.e., by using flat rates] has led to the transmission of large numbers of communications of the most trivial character." p. 78

Local manager in Seattle listened in on conversations:

20% orders to stores and businesses

20% homes to own businesses

15% social invitations

30% "purely idle gossip"

p. 79

"Innovations generally spread from well off to those of modest income and from urban residents to rural people." p. 86

Phone adoption varied widely from state to state. "As late as 1927 the percentage of familes with telephones varied from 22 percent to 65 percent across BNell's 100 largest exchanges." p. 87

3 towns in Northern California: Antioch, Palo Alto and San Rafael.

"The first few telephones in many nineteenth-century towns appeared at the railroad station, the druggist, a major landowner's home, or the sawmill, and were connected by copper wire to a swichboard in a larger town." p. 123

Localism: "the extent to which the locality bounds, delimits, or sets apart residents' lives, including their work, personal relations, politcal involvement, and identity." p. 194

commercial activity

social life

interest in the community

politics

"If the complex picture drawn in this chapter is faithful to reality, then neither the telephone nor automobile can be substantially credited or blamed for undermining localism in the early twentieth century." p. 221

"Although the net balance of change was in the direction of the wider world, it was not a weighty shift -- not as substantial as the increase in total social activity." p. 221

Various claims -- telephone resumes person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. Binding together kin. Alleviate rural isolation.

Substitute electronic communication for face-to-face encounters. A semblance of "real" relations.

Larger but shallower kinds of community. p. 224

Sociologist Peter Berger claimed:

[to] us the phone habitually also means to learn a specific style of dealing with ohters -- a style marked by impersonality, precision, and a certain superficial civility. The key question is this: Do these internal habits [italic] carry over [/italic] into other areas of life, such as nontelephonic relations with other persons? The answer is almost certainly yes. The problem is: just how and to what extent?

p. 224

Malcolm Willey and Stuart Rice also concluded that "[p]ersonal isolation -- inaccessibility to the demands of others for access to one's attention -- is increasingly rare, and, when desired, increasingly difficult to achieve." p.. 225

wrong kinds of sociability over the phone -- idle chit chat between women, indiscretions because unsupervised, privacy concerns.

Surveys done in the last 3 decades suggest that people today most often use the phone for social or vaguely personal reasons rather than for practical matters. AT&T research shows that half of the calls from any given residence go to only five numbers, indicated that repeated conversations are held within a small circle of friends and family. p. 226

Rural people, especially farm women, depended heavily on the telephone for sociability, at least until they owned automoobiles. -- observers repeatedly claimed that telephoning sustained the social relations -- and even the sanity -- of women on scattered homesteads. p. 226

"Research, largely by AT&T, shows that American weomn today are likely to have telephones at home than are men, that the number of women or teenage girls in a household better predicts how often calls are made than does the number of males, and that women dial most residential long-distance calls. An Austrialian study showed that women made longer telephone calls than did men. A large French study found that women spent far more time on the telephone than did men, employemnet status notwithstanding.. An English survey found that women called their kin and friends much more often than men called theirs. An Ontario survey of people 50 and older showed that women were two or three times more likely to telephone their firiends than were men..." p. 231

"Ann Moyal recently interviewed over 200 Australian women about that subject [what does all this calling by women mean?] She concluded that women in all areas of the country ' attach a high importance to telephone conversation and its essential place in their personal affairs' and that the telephone was 'a key site for kin-keeping, caring, friendship, support, voluntary activity and contact with the wider world." 26 p. 232

Industry men considered women's social use of the telephone a problem, and tried to surpress it... until the late 1920s and 1930s p. 232

Why? Three plausible answers

1.) modern women have been more isolated from adult contact during the day than men,

2.) married women's duties have usually included the role of social manager -- "as Rakow puts it, "telephone talk is the work women do to hold together the fabric of the ommunity..."37 p/ 235

3.) North American women are more socially adept and intimate than North American men, Some evidence suggests that women's advantage over men in sociability is greater for telephone contacts than it is for face-to-face interaction.39 p. 235

communication-transportation trade off for personal interaction.

Did telephoning REPLACE visiting?

Did people visit the same amount and ALSO have phone conversations?

Did people visit even MORE?

"...but it is much likelier that the total volume of social conversations increased notably. The telephone probably meant more talk of all kinds." p. 239

"Not even a teleohone company publicist could asset tht telephone calls capture the intimacies conveyed by eye contact and physical touches, or that telephone friendships can plumb the same depths as sharing meals, taking walks, or just being together. But the question is not whether a telephone conversation is as rich as a face-to-face one. It probably is not." 50 p 239

The question is, can telephoning sustain a relationship, or does it provide only an 'inauthentic' intimacy?

Canadian survey of middle-aged and elderly, "I feel I only have to lift the telephone and I can be right there with my family" about 2/3rds of those over 55 agreed A LOT, however of those 55 and under, 55% pf the women and 37% of the men agreed A LOT.

"For almost all Americans today, the telephone has become an "anonymous object," part of the everyday environment, like houses, streets, and grocery stores. p .259

"The social implications of a technology cannot be simply deduced from its operational feastures. One claim about the telephone, discussed in Chapter 8 has been its that insistent ring demands instant response, leading in turn to constant tension. The answering machine -- a minor modification of the technology -- allows people to ignore the ring witnout losing the message. Has the social meaning of the telephone been so easily reversed?" p. 259

"Despite the romance of speaking over long distances, Americans did not forge new links with strange and faraway people. Despite experiments with novel applictions of the telephone, they did not attend concerts, get healed, hold town meetings, or change lifestyles via the telephone. As well as using it to make practical life easier, Americans -- notably women -- used the telephone to chat more often with neighbors, friends, and relatives; to save a walk when a call might do; to stay in touch more easily with people who lived an inconvenient distance away. The telephone resulted in a reinforcement, a deepening, a widening, of existing lifestyles more than in any new departure." p. 263

"Did the telephone undermine local community? Did it foster detechment from place? Or, as a few observers have suggested, did telephone contacts intensify local interactions?" conclusion -- Northern Californians increased their interest and involvement in the world outside their immediate towns, but they also expanded their local activity at the same time. p. 265

"The telephone appears to be implicated more in another trend.[sic] that of increasing privatism. By privatism I do not mean a retreat into the nuclear family, which many writers see as a result of suburbanization in particuler. I refer instead to the participation in and valuation of private social worlds as opposed to the larger, public community." p. 265

"(Most telephone relations, even today, are combined with frequent personal meetings. The archetypeal telephone tie, one carried on soley through long distance calls, is unusual.) The best estimate is that, on the whole, telephone calling solidified and deepened social relations." p/ 266

the history of the telephone "can best be understood if technologies are viewed from the vantage point of the user rather than from the perspective of the inventor or marketer." p 269

"The interplay between techbnology and society can also be better understood, I argued, with the cumulation of detailed social-historical studies of how average users emploed new devices. Although many rich accounts exist telling of society's role in technology -- that is, studies of social influences on technological development -- there are few such detailed analyses of a technology's role in society.