The Sociology of the Telephone

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The

Sociology

of the

Telephone*
U.S.A.

SIDNEY H. ARONSON

John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the University of New York, New York,

THE WELTER of recent writing on the phenomena of &dquo;modernization&dquo; and social change scant attention has been granted to technological innovations themselves as direct sources of new human needs and behavior patterns. Yet it seems apparent that the kind of modernization experienced by the Western world, and more specifically the United States, over the past century is intimately tied, both as cause and effect, to the availability of the telephone as an easy, efhcient and relatively inexpensive means of communication. This may seem only to restate the obvious, yet how rarely is the telephone so much as mentioned in contemporary discussions of social change or modernization?’ This is the more remarkable as the process of communication, generically considered, has come to be recognized as the &dquo;fundamental social process&dquo; without which society and the individual self could not exist. Communication-in-general (if such a thing can be imagined) has been much studied but the meaning and the consequence for individuals of being able to pick up something called a telephone and rapidly transmit or receive messages have been all but ignored. As with so many other aspects of social life that which we take most for granted usually needs to be most closely examined. This inattention to the social consequences of the telephone is the more surprising still in light of the importance usually attached to the presence or absence of mass media of written communication in explaining differences among societies. It has become usual to distinguish between pre-industrial and industrial societies, each type manifesting distinctive characteristics partly attributable to the widespread dissemination and accessibility (by way of general literacy) of the printed word. It is surely conceivable that the presence or absence of a system of two-way oral-aural communication may account for equally important differences between types of societies, that the distinction between a society with and one without a developed telephone system may be as great as that between one with and one without a developed system of printed media or even as great as that between a literate and a non-literate society. A necessarily brief examination of the history of the telephone in the United States will support these assertions.
*

AMID

1

I am grateful to Professor Richard Greenbaum of John Jay College for his considerable contribution to this article. The number of telephones present in a country is frequently used as an indicator of "modernization" by sociologists but the process by which telephone communications contributed to the changes implied by that term are not considered.

154 Whether
a

matter

of social

structure or

of &dquo;national character&dquo; American

society not only fosters technological innovation but typically embraces it with alacrity once it occurs. The introduction and almost immediate acceptance of the telephone in the United States after 1876 is characteristic. That Americans at that particular moment in history wanted to or &dquo;needed&dquo; to communicate
and faster ways facilitated the transformation of their behavior and the society.’ The remainder of this paper will present a brief survey of some of the areas of American life where the &dquo;modernizing&dquo; impact of the telephone has been most pervasive and obvious. If the discussion that follows may seem, by implication at least, to give to the telephone an unwarranted primacy as an agent of modernization such an overstatement of the case can be justified as an understandable reaction to ninetyodd years of scholarly neglect, not to say disdain. The telephone, like modernization itself, has insinuated itself into even the most remote crevices of American life; the ubiquity of its ringing as an accompaniment to our daily lives can perhaps best be compared to the ever present tolling of church bells in a Medieval village or bourg. The railroad, the electric light, the automobile, even the bathroom-not to speak of the more dramatic radio and televisionhave all been granted their moment on the scholarly stage, to be examined more or less intensively, more or less dispassionately. The time seems overripe for a comprehensive examination of the slighted telephone. Nor is the story by any means all told. The recent development of a &dquo;picturephone&dquo; which adds the visual capability of television to the traditional telephone promises to make a new chapter in the history of Bell’s creation as well as a new dimension to human communication. in
new

structure and character of their

The

Telephone and the Economy

What can be said regarding the most pervasive effects of the telephone on the organization and conduct of American economic life, aside from the obvious rise of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company itself as an economic monolith? Perhaps the most conspicuous of these effects has been the dramatic contraction in the time needed to establish communication, transmit orders and consummate business transactions, what for the sake of brevity, may be called &dquo;transaction time.&dquo; By bringing two or more persons, often separated by long distances, into direct and immediate communication the telephone eliminated much of the time which otherwise would have been spent in writing letters or traveling to meetings. Telephoning did not, of course, replace written communication and face-to-face meetings; it rather supplemented them and altered some what their character. The telephone greatly
1 This statement should not be taken as advancing a monocausal theory of social change predicated on the idea of direct technological determinism. Far from it. Mutual indepen-

dence has

always

characterized

technological and social change.

155

speeded the pace and the responsiveness of business at the same time that it tended to change the relations among businessmen from those between whole personalities to those between differentiated, functionally specific &dquo;roles&dquo;, a fact which may help to explain the almost compulsive informality and conviviality that obtains when businessmen finally do come together face-to-face This suggests that the increased efficiency of doing business may have been paid for, in part, by a decrease in the personal and emotional satisfactions of business activity. We are, for example, all aware that the insistent ringing of the telephone usually takes priority even over an ongoing face-to-tace business conversation. The significance of this ordering of priorities needs to be examined as does the actual extent to which various kinds of businesses are dependent for their conduct on telephonic conversation.’ In addition the telephone made possible the efficient organization and operation of large-scale, integrated, mass production manufacturing enterprisis. In the production of automobiles, for example, a single plant may comprise a hundred or more buildings sprawled over several hundred acres and employing thousands of workers. It is hard to see how the communications necessary for the effective coordination of such aggregates of men and machines could be arranged economically and efficiently without the use of the telephone. No previous mode of communication was able to combine the latter’s speed with its simplicity and economy of operation. Had major industrial expansion come to an America lacking the telephone it would surely have resulted in physical arrangements very different from those we know today. It may be more than coincidence that Henry Ford’s introduction of assembly line production in 1913 came at 2a time when telephone technology had already attained a sophisticated level.2 If each telephone were considered as a replacement for a human message carrier and further consider that the average number of telephone calls completed in the United States during 1968 was 426,200,000 per day, at least a vague idea can be gained of the effects of telescoping &dquo;transaction time&dquo; and of the extent to which the telephone system is the life-blood of the American economy.3 Of course, not all these telephone calls were business calls and not all those that were were necessary, in a rational sense, to the conduct of business. The existence of a convenient, easy and inexpensive means of communication
1

2 3

On the extent to which American businessmen hastened to take advantage of the telephone Telephone and Telegraph Company, National Telephone Directory (New York, October, 1894), (New York, October, 1897); Department of Commerce and Labor, United States Bureau of the Census, Special Reports Telephones: 1907 (Washington, 1910), 74-75; Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago, 1910), 204-211. Arthur Pound, The Telephone Idea (New York, 1926), 42-43. These calls were distributed as follows: 330,200,000 were handled by the Bell SystemAmerican Telephone and Telegraph and its subsidiaries-and 96,000,000 by the Independent telephone companies. The figure does not include calls made between two extensions connecting through the same switchboard, but only calls between independent numbers. The total number of such calls in the United States in 1968 is in the trillions. Statistical Abstracts of the United States (Washington, 1969), 495.
see, American

156

doubtless increases the perceived &dquo;need&dquo; of people to communicate with others as well as their opportunity so to do. This latter consideration raises the rather different question of the psychological as well as social functions served by the telephone, a question to be raised below. The extent to which the telephone facilitated the consolidation of American corporate enterprise in the post-Civil War period should not be overlooked. The years from 1875 to 1914, during which telephone use spread rapidly, witnessed the growth of giant corporations and the formation of trusts, despite the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. The telephone possessed obvious superiorities over the telegraph in the planning and coordinating of business activity, especially where delicate and, at time dubiously legal manipulations were involved. It was far easier to use, required no intermediaries to encode and decode its message (thus necessarily making them privy to its contents and impairing the secrecy of the communication) and, perhaps most important, it left no written or printed record which might later prove embarrassing or incriminating.’ Secrecy could be assured by face-to-face meetings but rail travel was far slower and more uncomfortable than a phone conversation and eventually phone lines connected many more points than rail lines.2 It is suggestive that E H. Harriman, one of the master trust-builders of the period, had one hundred telephones in his mansion at Arden, New York, sixty of which were directly linked to long distance lines. An obviously naive magazine writer referred to Harriman’s attachment to the talking machine by writing: &dquo;He is a slave to the telephone.&dquo; Harriman replied, &dquo;Nonsense, it is a slave to me.&dquo;3 Another major impact of the telephone on the business life of the nation may be seen in its effect on the development and expansion of the stock, bond, and commodity markets. The widespread use of the telephone probably added to the short-run instability of such markets, but at the same time, it permitted, for the first time, their development on a truly national scale and the widespread dissemination of stock ownership. The continuous spreading and the ever increasing efficiency (at least until the decade of the 1960’s) of telephone communication (supplemented by the private wire system of brokerage houses) means that financial information is continuously available and that
1

advantages were stressed in advertisements appearing in the telephone directory: ’Despatch and Privacy’ are among the important features of Long Distance Telephone Service. All subjects may be described without reserve." National Telephone Directory (1897), 733. Virtually every advertisement in that directory was directed toward educating businessmen of the benefits to be derived from using the telephone and especially the long
These
"

2

3

distance lines. "To Omaha and return in five minutes by LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE."; "The Mail is quick, the Telegraph is quicker but the LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE is instantaneous and you don’t have to wait for an answer."; "The Long Distance Telephone Furnishes the only satisfactory Substitute for a personal Interview." Ibid., 565, 715, 723. This certainly implies that the use of the telephone during this period was substituted for much business-related rail travel. See also, Special Reports : Telephones : 1907, 75. Casson, History of the Telephone, 205-206.

157 the most modest order will be executed on the floor of a major exchange no than a few minutes after it has been given by the customer to his broker. The history of the Wall Street market crash of 1929 only proves, among other things, that the telephone, as every other technological advance, can be a curse as well as a blessing, depending on the circumstances.’ By the same token the telephone eventually affected the buying and selling, both wholesale and retail, of almost all goods and services produced by the economy, although these effects have never been uniformly distributed. Even the most cursory examination of the first telephone directories illustrates that very soon after its invention much of American business took advantage of the new electronic wonder. Early directories facilitated the conduct of commerce by printing the kind of business or trade of the subscriber (a foreshadowing of the yellow pages). Indeed, a national telephone directory of 1894 which included all the customers of American Telephone and Telegraph in the United States who were connected by metallic circuit lines with its long distance system, is a summary of the nation’s economic activities and gives evidence that virtually every product and service in the economy could be ordered by telephone.2 Not only did the telephone stimulate trade by making buying and selling more convenient, it also furnished a medium for an incalculable but staggeringly large amount of mouth-to-mouth advertising, a most effective way of stimulating wants.3 That telephone communication was a superb medium for advertising was because early users of the telephone tended to act exactly like those who later got their first radio or television receivers, that is they used the electronic wonder incessantly. Some critics of the telephone wrote of &dquo;telephone fiends&dquo;, criminals, who stole time; others discovered the disease of &dquo;telephonics&dquo;, a dread malady, which could visit an 4 entire community.4 The central role of the telephone in commerce could also be seen in the custom in some businesses for contractual arrangements entered to over the telephone to have the same binding quality as written and signed contracts. Professionals such as doctors and lawyers also listed occupations along with their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the directories. A complete study of the impact of the telephone will have to include the question
even
more

1

2 3 4

early as 1910 Casson could write: "As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species, they practically all their business by telephone. In their stock exchange stand six hundred and forty-one booths, each one the terminus of a private wire. A firm of brokers will count it an ordinary year’s talking to send fifty thousand messages; and there is one firm which last year sent twice as many." History of the Telephone, 205. The even greater dependence of the stock market on telephone communications nowadays can be appreciated from the fact that daily phone volume on Wall Street in 1968 average 1,140,000 outgoing calls, to say nothing of incoming calls. The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1969. National Telephone Directory, 1894. Pound, The Telephone Idea, 44. Minna T. Antrim, "Outrages of the Telephone," Lippincotts’ Monthly Magazine, Vol. 84 (July, 1909), 125-126; Maude A. White, "Those ’Telephonics’. Have You One in Your Home?" Delineator, Vol. 96 (May, 1920).
transact

As

158 of the effects of the phone on the conduct of professional practice; for example, how did the use of the telephone affect the patterns of non-hospital medical care and the doctor-patient relationship? How did it affect the ways in which professional practitioners attracted clients and the sinze of the area from which they drew them? The telephone and its related institutions summoned into being many novel services. The enterprising developer of the first central telephone exchange, George W. Coy, formerly a proprietor of a messenger service in New Haven, provided a free telephone to the United States Signal Service in that city and then advertised: &dquo;Anyone having a telephone can make inquiries as to the weather, temperature, and barometer.&dquo;’- The provision of time reports, answering services for businesses and individuals and wake-up calls for the 2 indolent also became available in a number of cities.2 Changes in the occupational structure can be traced to the introduction and spread of the telephone and are not confined to those directly associated with the development, building, operation and servicing of the system itself. One occupational variant created by the telephone was, appropriately enough, that of &dquo;call girl&dquo;, while that of messenger doubtless suffered serious attrition, though not total extinction. Finally, no exploration of the likely economic effects of the telephone would be complete without suggesting that the instrument’s services to illegitimate business enterprises have probably been as great (and as profitable to the phone companies) at its services to more legitimate activities.3 The existence of organized, corporate crime as we are afflicted with it today, is just as inconceivable without the telephone as more morally acceptable corporate empires. Gambling of all types (but especially horse racing), prostitution (the &dquo;call girl&dquo; again) and drug dealing could probably not exist at their present levels of activity and profitability in the absence of the telephone. And if legitimate brokers and salesmen solicit customers over the telephone so do swindlers, &dquo;conmen&dquo; and &dquo;boiler-room&dquo; operators of all sorts. The telephone as an instrument of communication is morally neutral, though the uses to which it is put are surely not. The

Telephone and Mass Communications

From modest beginnings the telephone led ultimately to the developmeni of institutions and instruments, most notably the radio, for the instantaneou;
1 2

3

DeLand, "Notes On The Development of Telephone Service," Popular Scienc Monthly LXX (January, 1907), 51. As early as 1909, for example, the Chicago Telephone Company had 60,000 requests pe day for the time, the largest number coming in the hour between 7:00 and 8:00 A.M In the same period, the New York Telephone Company was averaging 80,000 "Tim please" calls. Katherine M. Schmitt, "I Was Your Old ’Hello Girl’ The Saturday Evenin Post, Vol. 208 (July 12, 1930), 121. J. Flynt, "Telephone and Telegraph Companies as Allies of Criminal Pool Rooms, Cosmopolitan, Vol. 43 (May, 1907), 50-57.
Fred
"

159

dissemination of news, entertainment and &dquo;culture&dquo; to the masses. Institutions of mass communication are a defining characteristic of a modern industrial society and in America those institutions arose out of the uses to which the telephone was put and the new needs to which those uses gave rise. It often happens that a successful new means of satisfying an existing need gives rise in its turn to still further needs, the perception or even the existence of which were necessarily screened from awareness by the original unfulfilled need. To put the matter in epigrammatic terms we may say that a kind of Parkinson’s Law operates in the matter of needs, as elsewhere in social life, that &dquo;needs&dquo; expand to equal the possibilities of satisfying them. The history of the telephone provides an example of the continuing cycle of social change that operates when the satisfaction of one &dquo;need&dquo; leads to the generation of new &dquo;needs&dquo; and new social arrangements for their fulfillment. Let us now look at some of the effects of the telephone on the institutions of communication in American

society.
The perfection of the telephone represented a giant stride toward the goal of the immediate transmission of information, the virtual elimination of the time lapse between the occurrence of an event and public knowledge of it. The invention of the telegraph a generation before had been an advance toward that goal but by comparison with the telephone the older device was slow, expensive, involved and restricted in its use. Mass communication by way of the telephone at first developed informally, rather as a by-product of its primary uses than according to any deliberate design, but in time those services became formalized and continuous and came to be deemed indispensable to the functioning of American society. From an early period local telephone operators, who may be visualized as occupying the center of a more or less wide ranging communications network, took on the role of informal news broadcasters. They were able to play this role not only because of their central position in the communications network but because the demands of their job were still modest enough to leave them considerable free time during the working day. In the role of informal newscasters they provided information of general interest to people in their locality such as reports of fires and floods, police bulletins and missingperson reports, as well as specialized services to physicians, among others.’ The end result of this informal practice was that many subscribers came to feel
1
It was not unusual in the period to 1900 for operators to take calls for the services of physicians who were out on home visits. These doctors would then call in and be given their messages. Still later, doctors became so accustomed to using the phone to keep in touch with patients that a court held the Southern Telephone Company for damages when an operator failed to complete a call to a doctor sought for a sick patient who subsequently died. "Failure to Reach Physician by Telephone Responsibility of Telephone Company for Death of Patient," American Law Review, Vol. 46 (July, 1912), 596-598. On operators as informal news broadcasters see, "When the Hello-Girl Tries Her Hand at Detective Work," Literary Digest, Vol. 195 (November 5, 1927), 52-54; Helen C. Bennett, "The Voice at the End of the Wire," Ladies Home Journal, XXXII (March, 1915), 8, 64; Schmitt, "I Was Your Old ’Hello Girl’," 121.

160

that they had the right to demand and receive such information from telephone

operators. The public’s interpretation of the phone company’s &dquo;information&dquo;
service so broadened that the latter eventually found it necessary to restrict that service to the narrow range it covers today.’ But by the time public abuse of the information service had combined with the sharp increase in telephone traffic to end the informal newscasting role of the telephone operator (except perhaps in isolated rural areas, where she may continue to play that role even now) the direction of still newer communications arrangements was

already becoming apparent. These early informal applications of the telephone suggested to various imaginative and enterprising people the possibility of a more formal arrangement for satisfying the rising demand for information and for other messages of general interest and entertainment value. This thought led in time to the transformation of the telephone from an informal source of news into a new institution which, for a time, challenged the supremacy of the newspaper as a source of information and ultimately led to a completely new mode of communication.
Alexander Graham Bell himself who first demonstrated the teleas a vehicle of entertainment. As early as 1879 he had transmitted music from the stage of Chickering Hall in New York City to a home in Yonkers. A few years later Alfred Ely Beach, editor of Scientific American, had~ Sunday sermons piped into his home via the telephone lines (shades of later radio preachers!) while during the ’80’s plays were similarly &dquo;broadcast&dquo; 2 to private homes from the stage of a New York theater.2 But the crucial development came in 1898 when the first &dquo;telephone newspaper&dquo;-the precursor of the radio station-was established in Budapest, Hungary. Using telephone lines and receivers the telephone newspaper broadcast news reports from early morning until late at night. Nor did it restrict its offerings to news; it also provided concert and theatrical performances. In addition it distributed printed programs to its subscribers and alerted them to special bulletins with a loud whistle.3 Telephone-newspapers on the Budapest model were shortly established throughout the United States, although they varied widely in the services they offered. In some rural areas communication was two-way-unlike the Budapest system-and subscribers could question the &dquo;stentor&dquo; as the broadcaster was called. It is said that discussions similar to those heard today on 4 radio &dquo;talk programs&dquo; often ensued between subscribers and stentors.4
It
was

phone’s potential

1 2

Schmitt, "I Was Your Old ’Hello Girl’ ", 121. C. E. McCluen, "Hearing Operas by Telephone," Scientific American, Vol. 106 (May 11, 1912), 419; "Preaching Through the Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 52 (May 20, 1916),
1457. F. A.

3

Talbot, "A Telephone Newspaper," The Living Age, Vol. 238 (August 8, 1903), 372-376; Thomas S. Denison, "The Telephone Newspaper," World’s Work, I (April,

4

1901), 640-643. Telephone Newspaper," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 16, 1912), 528-529; "The Farmer and the Telephone," Independent, Vol. 54 (March 13, 1902), 649.
"American

161
In Philadelphia the Bell System arranged with a newspaper, The North American, in 1903, to have special operators provide callers with news summaries at any hour of the day or night..’ It is also reported that schools subscribed to a similar service so that students might learn of events as they unfolded, one of 2 the earliest examples of an electronic teaching aid.2

The

Telephone, the Community and

Social

Relationships

The transformation of many aspects of urban life can be traced to the influence of the telephone either directly or in combination with other aspects of modernization. For the sake of convenience one can divide these effects into three classes: effects on the physical appearance of the community; effects on social interaction, and effects on patterns and models of communication

telephone on the design of urban and suburban areas compared to that of innovations in the realm of probably transportation (including the elevator) and the effects of building and zoning codes. But the telephone probably facilitated the separation of workplace
has been minor from residence so characteristic of the American economy. Far more important have been the effects of the telephone on the patterns and the quality of social relationships in urban areas. Those sociologists and social critics who studied the urban environment during the first thirty years of this century almost universally lamented the waning role in society played by primary groups and the declining solidarity of the neighborhood itself. They contrasted the impersonal, fragmented quality of contemporary urban life with an image of warm personal relationships believed to have characterized small towns and urban neighborhoods of an earlier age. (The degree to which this image corresponded to reality is not significant in this connection.) Earlier communities were thought of essentially as interacting groups of kinsmen and neighbors (who were also one’s friends). In such communities all but the very wealthy were likely to confine their social contacts to members of their extended families and those living in close physical proximity; it was difficult and costly (of time if not always of money) to get to know others nor was it considered necessary. People’s horizons were limited, in large part by the difficulties of other than purely local transportation and communication. The invention of the telephone, among other developments, helped to raise those horizons. The breakdown of the earlier style of community life is regarded by most sociologists as the consequence chiefly of large scale industrialization and urbanization, of all that is connoted by the development of a &dquo;mass society&dquo;. The extended family, the most important primary group, often disintegrated and dispersed as its consistuent units, responding to expanding economic
1

among people. The influence of the

The

2

"Sociological

Philadelphia Directory, 1902, 512. Effects of the Telephone," Scientific American, XCIV (June, 16, 1906), 500.

162
scattered over an ever widening geographical area. Although later studies have shown that the conjugal family is less isolated than once thought and although sociologists have discovered new types of primary groups in American life they have tended to see the latter as shifting friendship groups and cliques grounded either in the formal work situation or in informal associational activities rather than as stable groups on the model of the family. Completely overlooked has been the changing nature of the &dquo;neighborhood&dquo; made possible by the almost universal availability of the telephone. With the spread of the telephone a person’s network of social relationships was no longer confined to his physical area of residence (his neighborhood, in its original meaning); one could develop intimate social networks based on personal attraction and shared interests that transcended the boundaries of residence areas. It is customary to speak of &dquo;dispersed&dquo; social networks to denote that many urban dwellers form primary groups with others who live physically scattered throughout a metropolitan area, groups which interact as much via the telephone as in face-to-face meetings.’ Such primary groups

opportunities,

constitute a person’s &dquo;psychological neighborhood.&dquo; Modern transportation, of course, makes it possible for such groups to foregather in person but it is highly doubtful that they could long sustain their existence without the cohesion made possible by the telephone. The nature, the structure and the functions of such psychological neighborhoods and telephone networks, whether or not they are considered to be &dquo;primary&dquo; groups are very obscure. The author has discovered one such network consisting of a group of elderly widows living alone who maintain scheduled daily telephone contacts as a means of insuring the safety, health, and emotional security of the group’s members. The questions yet to be answered are, in brief, who talks to whom, often for how long, for what reasons and with what results? By this circuitous route we return to the question raised earlier, that of what functions the use of the telephone serves for individuals rather than for the structure of the society as a whole or its consistuent institutions. This question requires detailed investigation but it may be suggested that among the most likely functions are the reduction of loneliness and anxiety, an increased feeling of psychological and even physical security and the already mentioned ability to maintain the cohesion of family and frienship groups in the face of residential and even geographic dispersion. Recent sociological inquiries have illuminated somewhat the role of the telephone in maintaining the cohesion of families in the face of pressures of industrialization but little is known about the variables (e.g., distance, degree of kinship, stage of the family cycle) associated with variations in these patterns. Finally, it may not be amiss to suggest that, at least in the early years of its existence, the possession of a telephone may have served both to define and to
1 On the notion of "social networks" see, Elizabeth Bott,

Family and Social Network (London,

1957).

163
enhance the social status of individuals, a function which, for a time, probably every consumer oriented technological innovation has served. While the various questions and hypotheses we have examined above have been raised in relation to urban life they are no less valid when applied, mutatis mutandis, to the conditions of rural life. The rural, relatively isolated &dquo;folk&dquo; society (gemeinschaft) has frequently been idealized by nostalgic critics of contemporary &dquo;mass society&dquo; (gesellschaft) because such writers deplore the loss of those warm, primary-group relations and that sense of

belonging to an organic, solidary community which they believe-or imaginehave characterized earlier rural and small town life. The type case of such a social order-as the origin of the idea in late nineteenth century German sociological romanticism immediately suggests-was rather the European peasant village or castle town of the High Middle Ages than the American farming community of the 1880’s or 1890’s. The typical American rural family of that period lived on its own farm, separated from any neighbors by distances ranging from a quarter mile to five miles or more. In consequence, the local town, which had to be within a few hours ride by horse and wagon, served chiefly as a trading center rather than as the scene of a richly textured organic community life. This is not to deny, however, that such towns served important socializing functions especially on those occasions-weekends and holidays-when all the families from the hinterland gathered there to renew acquaintanceships, buy provisions, compare experiences and entertain themselves and each other. The persistent theme of loneliness in accounts of nineteenth century American farm life suggests, however, that the &dquo;official&dquo; model of rural American society is closer to ideological fiction than to historical fact.’ For these reasons it may be suggested that the increasing modernization of rural America, far from eroding primary group ties, actually strengthened them by expanding the area from which primary (and secondary) group members could be selected while simultaneously freeing people from social and psychological dependence on what may at times have been uncongenial neighbors. The telephone broke through the isolation of the rural family. Moreover, the very construction of telephone lines in rural areas often gave impetus to social solidarity, as farmers frequently organized informal groups to string wires.2 That these early farmers’ mutual societies were organized so that all the farms in a given locality were on the same telephone line probably contributed further to the sense of shared communal identity. The whole area served by a telephone cooperative could inter-communicate simultaneously and, apparently, it was not unusual for all the families served by a single line to get on the phone at the same time to hear the latest news and discuss common problems. Since farmers’ wives were especially susceptible to feelings
to

1 2

Pound, The Telephone Idea, 32; Special Reports: Telephones 1907, 75. United States Department of Agriculture, Farmers’ Bulletin No. 1245, Farmers Telephone Companies (Washington, 1930), 5-6; Frank Gordon, "To Teach Farmers Telephone Repairing," World Technology Word, XXII (January, 1915), 722.

164

allay personal anxiety.’ The following statistic may illuminate both the importance of the telephone on the farm and its rapid acceptance by the rural population (which is typically thought to be more tradition bound than urban dwellers): according to the special telephone census of 1907, 160,000 (73%) of Iowa’s approximately 220,000 farms were already supplied with telephone service.2 The major share in this development was the work of farmers’ cooperatives. Assuredly, other factors such as the need for mutual aid and the economic advantages of being able to obtain up-to-date information on market conditions in the cities and towns played their part in the rapid spread of rural telephone service, but the importance of more strictly sociological and psychological factors must not be
of loneliness and

isolation,

the

telephone

here too

helped

to

underestimated.3 If the suggestions thus far advanced are ultimately confirmed by additional research it may turn out that the extent to which rural life in America actually does or ever did exhibit the characteristics of a solidary, organic community so often imputed to it is primarily the result of modernization and specifically of the introduction and spread of the telephone. This would also help to explain the greater uniformity of values and attitudes among the rural population ; for people who share common problems and interact frequently with one another tend to develop similar values and attitudes and to inhibit the expression of deviant sentiments. That rural areas have typically been served by party rather than individual lines has tended to make rural telephone conversations relatively public, thus facilitating both the reinforcement of dominant attutides and the suppresion of deviant ones.4 This situation stands in

sharp contrast to that prevailing in the heterogeneous urban residential neighborhood, with its mixing of people from many &dquo;psychological neighborhoods&dquo;, within which no single set of attitudes or behaviors could easily be imposed. In urban areas telephone messages tended to be transmitted on one or two-party lines and even if one’s physical neighbors took exception to one’s expressed values or behavior a person could usually find support for his &dquo;deviance&dquo; within his psychological neighborhood. Urban &dquo;deviance&dquo; is thus but the Janus face of privacy. A discussion of the social effects of the telephone would, however, be incomplete were reference to its relationship to other modes of communication
Spofford, "Rural Telephone: Story," Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Vol. 118 (May, 1909), 830-837; H. R. Mosnot, "Telephone’s New Uses in Farm Life," World’s Work, IX (April, 1905), 6103-4; "Spread of the Rural Telephone Movement," Scientific American, Vol. 104 (February 18, 1911), 162; Frederick Rice, Jr., "Urbanized Rural New England," XXXIII (January, 1906), 528-548. 2 Special Reports: Telephones 1907, 18, 23. 3 Ibid., 75-75. Access to the telephone was regarded as being so essential to life on the farm that the United States Department of Agriculture issued a bulletinin 1922 designed to assist farmers in establishing and improving telephone service. See Farmers Telephone Companies. 4 Spofford, "Rural Telephone: Story", 830-837; Mosnot, "Telephone’s New Uses in Farm Life," 6103-4.
1 H. P.

165

omitted. In the absence of research one can only suggest these relationships through a series of questions: Does telephone communication lessen or increase total face-to-face communication? Does it supplement or replace the latter? How does telephone communication change the character of face-to-face and of written communications? What effects has use of the telephone had on the rate of use of the telegraph and on the letter writing habits of Americans? Has there occurred specialization within the media of communication wherein certain kinds of messages are considered appropriate for transmission by telephone while other kinds are transmitted by telegraph (e.g., the congratulatory message) or by letters? And if so, why? What is the effect-in political campaigns and direct selling-of a telephone message directed to a

particular person as against a newspaper, radio,
to a mass, anonymous

or

telephone

message adressed

audience?’ these questions have not as yet been subjected to systematic Although research, some of them have been the subject of discussion and study. Among the first generation of Americans to use the telephone were those who were concerned about the ways in which people behaved while talking on
the phone and the rules evolving to govern that behavior. Some objected to Bell’s invention precisely because it seemed to generate new codes of conduct which were at variance with those governing face-to-face relationships. One can easily imagine the responses of men and women of social standing at discovering a social climber at the other end of the line. Other critics were shocked by the apparent absence of inhibitions when people spoke on the phone. One wrote of impulsive women who &dquo;say things to men and to each other over the telephone that they would never say face to face.&dquo; Others complained about people who made calls at inappropriate times, or who phoned last 2minute invitations, or about the obligation to return a call if one was missed.2 An early, more scientific approach to the question of how people behave on the telephone consisted of a study of the words spoken. The study, conducted in New York City in 1931, analyzed 1,000 telephone conversations. Eightythousand words were spoken in that sample of calls. Only 2,240 (3%) different words were employed and 819 of these were used only once. Thus 1,421 of the total number were words used over and over again. The study demonstrated not only the diminutive character of the vocabulary of the average American telephoner but suggested, at least, the general contents of the conversations: the most frequently used words were &dquo;I&dquo; and &dquo;me.&dquo;3
1

For a discussion of some of these questions see, G.S. Street, "While I Wait," Living Age, Vol. 276 (March 15, 1913), 696-7; Antrim, "Outrages of the Telephone," 125; Andrew Lang, "Telephone + Letter-Writing," The Critic XLVIII (May, 1906), 507-508; "Telephone and Telegraph Prospects," The Journal of Political Economy, XXII (April, 1914),

392-394.
2
3 84 (July, 1890), 125-126. "The Frequency of Words Used Over the Telephone," Science, Vol. 74 (August 14, 1931) supplement, 11-13. Everyday conversations have more recently been studied by a num-

Antrim, "Outrages of the Telephone," Lippincotts’ Monthly Magazine, Vol.

166
In recent years, it has been observed that for some time the telephone has to be used as an instrument of aggression and hostility. Such uses for the phone can probably be traced back to its earliest days but the additional anonymity provided by automatic dialing no doubt greatly encouraged the use of the telephone for such purposes. The behavior ranges from the standard April Fool joke (i.e. calling the Zoo and asking for Mr. Wolf) to the sex deviants who call women unknown to them personally and whose conversational style varies from the use of seductive language to enormous obscenity. There is also a kind of &dquo;persecution&dquo; apt to occur between acquaintances and friends which consists of calling at intervals, letting the phone ring until it is answered and then hanging up. &dquo;Crank-calls&dquo; probably are akin to poison pen letters. The opportunity to talk on the phone may also function to limit and to deflect the expression of hostility. Loud haranguing on the wire can mitigate situations that might otherwise lead to blows if the antagonists were face-toface. The practice of screaming at the operator may serve as a safety-valve. Whether she is employed by the telephone company or handless the switchboard for a large firm, the operator can be a built-in victim or target for the caller. Over the past century the telephone has been diffused throughout American As it has done so it has helped to transform life in cities and on farms and to change the conduct of American business, both legitimate and illegitimate; it imparted an impetus toward the development of &dquo;mass culture&dquo; and &dquo;mass society&dquo; at the same time it affected particular institutional patterns in education and medicine, in law and warfare, in manners and morals, in crime and police work, in the handling of crises and the ordinary routines of life. It markedly affected the gathering and reporting of news and patterns of leisure activity; it changed the context and even the meaning of the neighborhood and of friendship; it gave the traditional family an important means to adapt itself to the demands of modernization and it paved the way both technologically and psychologically, for the thematically twentieth century media of communication : radio and television.&dquo;
come

1

ethnomethodologists. See Emanuel A. Schegloff, "Sequencing in Conversational Openings," American Anthropologist, Vol. 70 (December, 1968), 1075-1095; The First Five Seconds : The Order of Conversational Openings, Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1967; Emanuel A. Schegloff and Harvey Sacks, "Opening Up Closings" unpublished manuscript; Donald W. Ball, "Toward a Sociology of Telephones and Telephoners," in Marcello Truzzi, ed., Sociology and Everyday Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), 59-74. Virtually each topic deserves at least a chapter of its own. The following references are intended as a guide to subjects not discussed elsewhere in this paper. "Improvements in the Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 92, (January 1, 1927), 42-49; "Few Telephones Mean High Death Rate," Ibid., Vol. 105 (May 24, 1930), 105; H. T. Wade, "Telephones Throughout the Fleet", World’s Work, XV (March, 1908), 9991-2; "Battles by Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 50 (June 19, 1915), 1464; "Directing An Attack," Scientific American, Vol. 83 (March 17, 1917), Supplement, 166; M. B. Mullett, "How We Behave

ber of

167
The

Comparative Perspective

While this discussion has concentrated on the cumulative impact of the telephone on American society over the past century, there are obvious advantages to examining its effects both in other industrialized societies of differing cultural traditions and in newly industrializing areas. The consequences of the telephone in other industrial societies have not necessarily been identical to those in American society and may, in fact, have been quite different, for any number of reasons. Only a comparative historical approach can distinguish recurrent structural and psychological effects of the telephone (or any other technological innovation) from idiosyncratic ones, can delineate the range of varying cultural contacts in channeling the effects of technological innovation. Studying the consequences of the telephone as it is being introduced in developing nations is, on the other hand, analagous to observing an experiment, with history as the laboratory. Furthermore, there are theoretical issues at stake which perhaps can only be resolved through comparative study. What degree of modernization in the American or Western sense is, for example, possible in the absense of a wellarticulated telephone system? A reflection on Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (New York, 1958) may be pertinent here. Either there were no developed telephone systems in the Middle East in the mid-1950’s (almost certainly not true in the case of Turkey) or the author overlooked their significance for, despite an incisive analysis of the role of mass communications in the modernization of such societies, he nowhere mentions the telephone in that connection. It may be that essential social communication in such societies emanates from a few strategic elite groups and is disseminated among the largely illiterate masses primarily by way of radio and television. Is an elaborate widely-dispersed telephone system necessary to successful modernization given the existence of the latter? The role of the transistor radio in the modernization of underdeveloped nations certainly cries out for analysis. These are more than idle questions for post-prandial senior common room debate: governments for developing societies require a rational basis for assigning priorities and allocating resources for the development of communications

systems.
Telephone," American Magazine, Vol. 86 (November, 1918), 44-45; Dr. Alfred Gradenwitz, "A German Police Telephone: Scientific Aids for Patrol Service," Scientific American, Vol. 75 (January 25, 1913), Supplement, 61; "A Pocket Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 30, 1912) 639; "Private Telephone System in School," Journal of Education, (March 31, 1910, 355; William F. McDermott, "Emergency Calls," Today’s Health, XXIX (November, 1951), 38; "Mine Rescue Telephone Equipment," Scientific American, Vol. 109 (November 1, 1913), 340; "Telephone in the Mississippi Flood," Literary Digest, Vol. 99 (August 20, 1927), 21; Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York, 1937); A. H. Griswold, "The Radio Telephone Situation," Bell Telephone Quarterly, I (April, 1922), 2-12; S. C. Gilfillan, "The Future Home Theatre," The Independent, LXXIII (October 10, 1912), 886-891; W. Rupert Maclaurin, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (New York, 1949).
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