Re: <nettime> Cellphones and the cancer of cellspace

[cisler <cisler@pobox.com>]

Matt Locke mentoned the service in Budapest.  Here's a bit more in my
selection of notes from one of my favorites books on technology. Steve
Cisler

Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Forecasting the telephone. Ablex1983 Norwood, NJ.

Because telephones were installed in areas that could afford it, it
stabilized affluent neighborhoods and separated them from deteriorating
ones. p47

Telphone companies provide much of the information for urban planning.

"The most direct means of approaching citizens on the planning issue was
reported in Los Angeles where a battery of phone girls called everyone in
the city to secure reactions, while mailing an explanatory folder."p47

p.48

The change of independent villages into satellites of cities is fostered
by the telephone.

>From 1900-1915 four developments undermined the autonomy of small towns
and villages: parcel post, rural free delivery, the automobile, and the
telephone. All of these led farmers to bank, buy, and sell in larger
centers of commerce.

Parcel Post was established in 1912 over the objections of small town
merchant. They saw it as a subsidy to Sears Robuck.


p50

In many places, every evening about 7:00 the farmers on a party line would
pick up their phones and have a community meeting.  The main news of the
day would be read. Problems would be discussed and plans laid for joint
activity. Indeed setting up the phone system itself wasoften a cooperative
activity.

Hendrick. "Telephone for the millions"McClure's Magazine October 1914 REA
Rural Telephone Service 1960 p51 Use of phone to track commodity prices.

Wm McKinley was the first whoused the telephone extensively. He ran his
1896 campaign by telephone from Canton, Ohio, including listening to the
proceedings of the Republican Convention in Chicago. p.73.

In Budapest a service operated from 1893 until after World War I, using a
formula much like that of radio today, delivering news, mucis, financial
information, and announcements to subscribers. About 1912 an unsuccessful
service of the same sort wase established in Newark, NJ. p 81-2

Everyone had made erroneous predictions or missed a surge in popularity
for others. The first patent for a fax was in 1843 (Alexander Bain in GB)
33 years before Bell'sinvention, but it only really caught on in the
1980's.About 1910 there was a lot of talk about the convergence of
telephone and telegraphy systems and later withthat of radio, but it has
not happened.

S.C. Gilfillian. "The Future Home Theatre" The Independent.  Oct. 17,1912.

There are two mechanical contrivances...each of which bears in itself the
power to revolutionize entertainment, doing for it what the printing press
did for books. They are the talkingmotion picture and the electric vision
apparatus with telephone. Either one will enable millions of people to see
and hear the same performance simultaneously, ...or successively from
kinetoscope and phonographic records...These inventions will become cheap
enought tobe ...in every home...You will have the home theatre of 1930, o
ye of little faith."

p 121-122 Operators served as disseminators of information,primarily time
and weather. NYC in the late 30's got 20 thousand weather requests and 60K
time. Inthe 1980's 145K weather;  time 129k. Where metering existed more
information services were introduced. Paris and shanghai offered shopping
info.  After automatic dialing was introduced recorded information was
offered to "relieve the trauma for their customers of the disappearance of
the friendly operator." In general, information services declined as
operators were eliminated.

p130 Suzanne Keller: The telephone produces communities without
contiguity. 133 Writers dating back to 1909 were shocked to discover young
people using the phone for conversations of a kind in which they would not
engage face to face. In the Victorian era there were many jokes about
sexual happenings on the phone.

p152 In 1894 Frank Perrine in Electrical Engineering noted a marked
difference between electrical engineers and other engineers in the spirit
of social reform. This was due in part to the unlimited horizons of
electrical science.





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