Telephones

The basic telephone has become a taken-for-granted part of our everyday life, but when it first appeared, its role was far from clear. This entry charts that early history and subsequent development, before outlining some of key social research relating to this technology. In doing so it becomes clear that it is important to look beyond the narrow details of the “use” of a technology to appreciate how the experience of telephony, its differentiated and evolving consumption, relates to wider social practices and relationships.

Telephony provides an example of how difficult it is to point to a first “inventor” of a new technology given that several researchers were working in this field. Some of these researchers were trying to improve telegraphy, by enabling it to carry more traffic, when they discovered how sound could be sent over wires. However, the telegraphy industry was not interested in developing this line of innovation because from its perspective the telegraph left a permanent record, which a sound message would not, and the development of automatic telegraphy for sending telegrams had led to one telegraphic vision of a telegraph going into every home and business. Even when first promoted by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone, for many observers at that time, had no obvious use—it was perceived as being a toy, notes Sidney Aronson.

Partly because of some technical limitations on the quality of two-way communications, there were early experiments using telephony for broadcasting music, drama, and news as a way of popularizing the technology. However, Bell had a long-term vision of point-to-point telephony replacing telegraphy and campaigned for this, including using advertisements that taught the general public how to use the telephone, in terms of telephone etiquette, and for what purposes it might be used.

The early focus of the telephone industry was on commerce and the telephone as a business tool only, but as telephony spread and became cheaper, it moved into professional homes. Although Bell had [Page 1440]foreseen socializing by phone, the industry initially concentrated on promoting more functional uses (e.g., shopping by telephone) and was generally critical of social chatting, seen as an inappropriate use of the technology, according to Patrice Flichy. The social use of the phone was noted as early as 1909 in a survey but only appears more substantially by the 1930s, constituting an innovation coming mainly from the actual practices of telephone users.

In the early years of the telephone, as was later to happen with the Internet and other innovations, there were various visions of the wider social impact the telephone might have but also of what social issues it might raise. For example, discussions among the engineering community speculated about how the new possibilities of communication by telephony might facilitate world democracy, overcoming social difficulties, creating and supporting new communities. But the technology also threatened to make the private world public, becoming a channel for revealing personal information. It could make children's contact with outsiders more difficult to supervise by parents, and it had the potential to support criminal activities.

...