Marvin (U. of Penn., Annenberg School of Communications) turns a
scholar's eye to the social and cultural history of late
19th-century technologies - specifically, the electric light, the
telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and phonograph. Gleaning from
popular and professional sources of the day, she assembles a lively
picture of emerging elites and benighted publics in America and
elsewhere. Electrical engineers were keen for recognition as an
expert elite, distancing themselves from craftsmen by founding
professional societies and journals and coining suitably arcane
jargon. The public at large, divided between enlightened laymen
(urban, educated, white and male) and the rest (hicks, non-white,
and women) perpetuated cultural cliches and Victorian mores. We
learn, for example, of Persian nomads who turned telegraph wire
into bracelets, and of women's natural addiction to the telephone
given their inherent loquaciousness. The inventions themselves
raised societal concerns. The potential for political control, for
deliberate deception or abuse through communications channels, was
early recognized. So was the potential for physical harm, in the
form of electric shocks, weapons of war, or capital punishment. But
physical benefit might also accrue - especially electrical "power"
to boost virility. The electric light became a source of public
spectacle and personal adornment long before it invaded homes. Some
saw the new communications media as a threat to social boundaries;
others envisioned a new one-world democracy. In many ways, Marvin's
multiple visions of technologies born just a century ago are a
sharp reminder that "la plus ca change. . ." One has only to think
of society's alarms and excursions on the theme of nuclear energy
or recombinant DNA to see the relevance and timeliness of the
author's engaging sociotechnological insights. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the history of electronic communication, the last quarter of the
nineteenth century holds a special place, for it was during this
period that the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless,
and cinema were all invented. In When old Technologies Were New,
Carolyn Marvin explores how two of these new inventions--the
telephone and the electric light--were publicly envisioned at the
end of the nineteenth century, as seen in specialized engineering
journals and popular media. Marvin pays particular attention to the
telephone, describing how it disrupted established social
relations, unsettling customary ways of dividing the private person
and family from the more public setting of the community. On the
lighter side, she describes how people spoke louder when calling
long distance, and how they worried about catching contagious
diseases over the phone. A particularly powerful chapter deals with
telephonic precursors of radio broadcasting--the "Telephone Herald"
in New York and the "Telefon Hirmondo" of Hungary--and the conflict
between the technological development of broadcasting and the
attempt to impose a homogenous, ethnocentric variant of Anglo-Saxon
culture on the public. While focusing on the way professionals in
the electronics field tried to control the new media, Marvin also
illuminates the broader social impact, presenting a wide-ranging,
informative, and entertaining account of the early years of
electronic media.
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