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Serving a Wired World - London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital (Hardcover)
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Serving a Wired World - London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital (Hardcover)
Series: Berkeley Series in British Studies, 17
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of
the new-the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and
our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on
many of today's communications tech workers mirror those of a much
earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the
London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive
telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth
century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely
on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for
seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing
thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly
unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth
operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and
app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of
information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of
liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the
twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the
administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications
systems created networks according to conventional gender
perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the
networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite
attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible,
these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern
life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized
status-from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant
sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly
neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one,
challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.
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