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The People's Network - The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,647
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The People's Network - The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age (Hardcover)
Series: American Business, Politics, and Society
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States
and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was
not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary
citizens-farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs-established
tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their
own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by
opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were
motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open
communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for
protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew,
independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local
networks and companies-a struggle with an emerging corporate giant
that has been almost entirely forgotten. The People's Network
reconstructs the story of the telephone's contentious beginnings,
exploring the interplay of political economy, business strategy,
and social practice in the creation of modern North American
telecommunications. Drawing from government documents in the United
States and Canada, independent telephone journals and publications,
and the archives of regional Bell operating companies and their
rivals, Robert MacDougall locates the national debates over the
meaning, use, and organization of the telephone industry as a
turning point in the history of information networks. The competing
businesses represented dueling political philosophies: regional
versus national identity and local versus centralized power.
Although independent telephone companies did not win their fight
with big business, they fundamentally changed the way
telecommunications were conceived.
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