Ithiel de Sola Pool (szerk.), The Social Impact of the Telephone

Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977.

How much difference has a device invented 100 years ago by Alexander Graham Bell, enabling people to converse across distance, made in our lives?

Like other day-to-day appurtenances of life - water, air, metals, plastics, streets, and electricity - we take the phone for granted; we use it without a thought. Historians or sociologists rarely mention it in their books; when they do, it is usually to assert that it has had a profound impact on society. Has it, and if so, how? That is what this book is about.

In this century of the telephone, life has changed more rapidly than ever before. In 1870, three-fourths of the American population was rural; in 1970 one-fourth was; and the population itself had grown five times. In 1870, only one person in fifty had finished high school; in 1970, one in two had. In 1870, no electric light illuminated the night, no automobiles traversed the streets; no buildings rose above walk-up height; no freezers or tin cans made foods available outside their season. Doctors, it is generally agreed, saved no more people than would be saved by chance. Great music or entertainment was available only to the few who could sit in a handful of theatres on a given night; many went from cradle to grave without ever experiencing such things.

Men never flew, either into the air or outer space. Radio waves, X-rays, viruses, chromosomes, genes, quanta, black holes, plastics, and electronics were unheard of. There were far fewer things dreamed of in their philosophy than in our experience. People lived close to their relatives, and if not - if for example they immigrated to a foreign country or moved West - it was a break approaching unto death; they might never speak to their kin again. Locally, when people wanted to go someplace, they usually walked; they shopped, worked, and visited mostly in their own neighborhoods.

Religion played a large role in community life. Respectable ladies did not work among men; vulgar words were not used in their presence or in print; obedience to elders was a cardinal virtue of the young.

In some complex causal way, all the changes of the century may have stemmed from science and technology. But how important was the telephone's specific technology in these processes of change? It is extraordinary how little has been written exploring this question.

The same thing, Keller notes below, could be said of most inventions. The impact of a few technologies on society has been traced closely by historians and sociologists: among them are the steam engine, the railroad, and the cotton gin - but not many more.

Social scientists have neglected the telephone not only along with, but also relative to, other technologies. As a cause of social change, transportation. Chapter 6 tells us, has been much more studied than communication. And among communication media, TV, radio, movies, even the telegraph have been studied more than the telephone.

The degree of this neglect, however, has varied over time. Earlier, the phone was an exciting novelty and received more attention. John Brooks, in Chapter 9, finds that the device's use as a symbol declined as it became more commonplace. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, magazine editors would occasionally run a piece about the telephone in the countryside, the "hello girls" (see Maddox), or the growth of the nation's largest corporation and its competitors. By the time the sociology of invention emerged as a field in the 1930s, however, the telephone was already becoming old hat and the new excitement was broadcasting.

The sociology of science can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Like so much else in the social sciences, the paradigm was the industrial revolution in which power machinery fostered factory production and thereby urbanism, which in turn shaped industrial civilization; theoretical interpretation was provided by Marx's thesis that productive technology shapes social relations and men's ideas. By the twentieth century, that insight had found its way, with appropriate restriction and partial incorporation, into the accepted wisdom of academic social science. Max Weber's counterstatement demolished the overly simple notion of a one-way causal process from the material base to social organization and then to the ideological superstructure, but it preserved the insight of the close causal linkage among them.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, sociology flourished most in Germany; it was fed by the debate over Marx, and it transmuted Social Democratic impulses into social theory. American sociologists in the 1910s and 1920s studied in and borrowed from Germany.

Thus stimulated, there emerged in the 1930s a lively American literature on technology and social change - what today would be called "technology assessment." William F. Ogburn was the leading exponent, while monographs by such authors as S. C. Giffillan, Lewis Mumford, and Hans Zilsel analyzed how various technologies (from the pump, sailing ship, and chronometer, to the automobile, airplane, and TV) changed social mores and relations. Perhaps the largest public impact was the study Recent Social Trends, commissioned by Herbert Hoover. In all the literature on technology and society, however, the telephone received little attention, much less than the cinema and radio; it had already passed its peak of popular attention by the 1930s. As a result, no sociologist of science in that first wave of technology assessment seriously examined the ways in which the telephone had changed society.

That question has been evaded for other reasons, too. All literature on how technology affects society, from the Marx-Weber debate through the sociology of science and to technology assessment today, is permeated by the subtle issue of what is meant by an effect. Causality, for all its importance, is an obscure concept in the social sciences. The problem recurs in the chapters in this book, for it is particularly well highlighted by the case of the telephone.

The telephone is distinctive (so several argue) in that it is a facilitating rather than a constraining device. Some other inventions have consequences that seem obvious and linear: Pasteur's discovery of vaccination reduced smallpox, and thereby suffering, and increased life expectancy. It had other more obscure and unanticipated second-order consequences, too, such as increasing the incidence of diseases of aging and complicating border regulations for travelers. Yet the primary effects are fairly straightforward. Some inventions such as the telephone seem to defy definition of even the primary effects; these seem polymorphous though indubitably large.

Wherever we look, the telephone seems to have effects in diametrically opposite directions. It saves physicians from making house calls, but physicians initially believed it increased them, for patients could summon the doctor to them rather than travel to him.¹ The phone invades our privacy with its ring, but it protects our privacy by allowing us to transact affairs from the fastness of our homes. It allows dispersal of centers of authority, but it also allows tight continuous supervision of field offices from the center. It makes information available, but reduces or eliminates written records that document facts.

The telephone's inherently dual effects are one reason for the paucity of literature on its social impact. Its impacts are puzzling, evasive, and hard to pin down. No matter what hypothesis one begins with, reverse tendencies also appear.

The phone, in short, adds to human freedom, but those who gain freedom can use it however they choose. Rather than constraining action in any one direction, the telephone is an agent of effective action in many directions.

That conclusion does not imply that the phone has no impact or that there is nothing to study. On the contrary, it implies that the study of the telephone's social impact belongs to the important and subtle class of problems in the social sciences which demands a logic more complex than that of simple causality - a logic that allows for purposive behavior as an element in the analysis. The theory of games and economic behavior is an example; economists do not predict a uniform consequence from a single input into the economic process; the specific consequences of the new input depend on purposive human calculations.

That, too, is how to look at the entry into man's experience of a device that permits instantaneous communication between persons at a distance. It is hard to imagine a more revolutionary change in man's relation to his universe; it transformed what previously seemed an eternal aspect of space and time. But other social variables shaped the use of that newfound power.

Because simple generalizations about the telephone's consequences are, therefore, likely to prove false, the chapters that follow are mostly empirical testing of what did happen. They report how the telephone was used in different societies, times, and institutions during its first 100 years. They compare the exceptional telephone experience in the United States in the private market to that in France (see Attali and Stourdze) and England (see Perry) where governmental concerns played a more controlling role.

The authors below find many surprising reversals; telephones had different impacts when they were scarce and limited to centers of commerce and power than when they became ubiquitous. For instance, several chapters (Gottmann's, Abler's, Keller's, Moyer's, and Thorngren's) consider the telephone's impact on patterns of urban life and settlement. The consequences are far from obvious; the telephone contributed considerably to urban sprawl and the mass migration to suburbia. It also helped create the congested downtowns from which people are now fleeing. The telephone's role in skyscraper development is largely unknown and fascinating, as the reader will discover. It also turns out that the phone had an important effect on the location of offices and factories, profoundly affecting the character of the American business elite. After reading Section III (on the telephone and the city), the reader may want to ask himself how captains of industry who spent their time at factory sites differed in perspective from those in Manhattan.

So the telephone's relation to the city has been complex and changing; it has been a catalyst in a series of changes from the 1880s until today. Neighborhoods decomposed as the city grew from a walking city to a vehicled one, and the telephone promoted that process. Neighborhoods were frozen by zoning and the telephone played a part in that, too. Cities grew and then exploded into megalopolitan regions also with the telephone's help. The story of changing urban ecology cannot be understood without examining its interaction with the phone system. Yet that relationship has not been examined in depth before. Rural life has also been profoundly affected by the telephone, but in quite different ways before and since the advent of automobile and radio. A telephone system with operators and party lines had a much different impact in the country from that of the modern automatic telephone. The party-line system created a community that proved a favorite subject for short stories and essays.² In many places, farmers gathered every evening by the phone to exchange news and gossip; today they sit by their TV sets or ride into town. While the modern automatically-switched telephone no longer performs the party line's functions, the new efficient instrument for private conversation serves purposes that the community channel never could.

...

Some differences in view appear among the authors, though dearly they are fewer than if our subject were policy alternatives or future forecasts. This book concerns what has actually happened. Yet even on that there are differences of interpretation. One issue arising in several papers is how far the physical possibility (created by the phone) of developing communities without contiguity is, in fact, being realized. How far and under what circumstances do human relations develop among people who do not meet face-to-face? Keller, Reid, Gottmann, Abler, and Thorngren all address this issue and marshall substantial evidence.

The answer from the past suggests that social relations are rarely initiated in that way; one might question, however, whether that is an eternal prediction. How far may purely telephone-based relationships develop if the long-distance/local cost differential continues to decline in the trend that Abler documents, if teleconferencing becomes common, or if video at some point enters into two-way use? We shall not try to predict, this is not a book of predictions, though clearly forecasting is a goal underlying anyone's interest in technology assessment. In this book we seek to understand the telephone's impact upon society in the past 100 years. Yet, because that analysis is a prelude to forecasts, it is interesting to ask how good our predecessors' forecasts were on the telephone's social impact. What did they expect the phone to do? Among those who forecast, who saw clearly and who did not, and how good were they as prophets? Those questions are addressed in several chapters, and most extensively in Chapters 1, 2, and 6.

The first two chapters deal with a particularly interesting set of anticipations. It was not initially obvious just how the new device, the telephone, would be used. Perhaps it could be used for central authorities to broadcast public messages; or it could be used, as it turned out to be, for individual conversations among pairs of citizens. Aronson and Briggs raise the question of why the broadcast concept, though often tried, had to wait fifty years for implementation by radio. Cherry notes that society would have been very different and less democratic if it had not come out that way.

Bell, Hubbard, Vail, and other telephone system founders had a remarkable record of prescience about the phone system's future. From the start. Bell anticipated a network of private phones serving not only the rich and powerful (who then could afford it) but also the poor. We raise the question below of how the system's founders saw its future with such clarity. There are a number of explanations, and several may be partially true. In this introduction, however, one of them deserves particular attention: to some degree, there may be an inherent determinism to the technology. Despite everything said before about the telephone's polymorphous character, its many uses, and the variation in its chosen use at different times and places, some direct consequences for society are also traceable from the very technology of the telephone.

Choices about how to use the phone are not all equally cost-effective. When governments chose to protect older modes of communication by restricting telephone growth (as happened in Europe), there was a price to pay. If a telephone entrepreneur at the turn of the century sought to use the telephone in broadcast mode, he had to find a market for a service that required substantial electric current and cope with serious interference problems, the Bell system had adjudged the market to lie rather in conversation given the service that the technology then permitted. The technical and economic constraints were real.

No law of nature, however, says that societies will always choose the solutions which make the most cost-effective use of the available technologies. In telephony, as Pierce argues, there are many examples of degraded systems arising from poor policy choices. If technology is in command, if there is any determinism to the technology itself, it is only under those circumstances where some Darwinian or rational process rewards the good choices and penalizes the bad. In the past, sovereign authorities protected themselves from such processes of comparison and selection. In many countries, their attitude seemed to be that if their national communication systems did not work very well, so be it; there was nothing to force them to change. Today, however, national isolation becomes increasingly difficult because the telecommunication network is now a global one. New technologies of telecommunication are burgeoning. The successful systems that make good use of technology's growing capabilities are interconnected with, and in obvious contrast with, systems that protect obsolete practices. Those who do not run hard in the race may pay a large penalty in standard of living, national power, and level of development.

In some circumstances and respects, therefore, technology is in command. The policy decisions adopted must reflect the requirements of the technology, or there will be a heavy price to pay.

The telephone's social impact is liberating, as we have already noted. It offers options to serve society's many varied and even contradictory needs. But those who fashion the use of the system need to take account of the specific technology and economics of this very complex machine. Indeed, to gain its liberating potential requires understanding of its technology.

The telecommunications network of the second century will undoubtedly do many great and wondrous things, only some of which we can now guess. Yet we can say with confidence that the institutions and societies that press forward most vigorously in the use of this technology will tend to shape the way of life of that century.

1. Telephony, vol. 9, no. 6, p. 492.

2. Cf. Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (New York: Bantam Paperback, 1970), p. 12.