Abstract

"Disciplining Telephone Users: Telephone Talk and the Instrumentalization of Personal Communication in the United States, 1880-1920"

Josh Lauer, University of New Hampshire (josh.lauer@unh.edu)

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Americans used telephones for the first time. Telephone talk was neither intuitive nor self-explanatory. Telephone users had to be taught how to speak through the telephone and how to interact with other telephone users. They had to be trained to follow new technical and social protocols to make telephone communication “work.”

While the surveillance and discipline of early telephone operators has received considerable scholarly attention, the disciplining of telephone users has not. The telephone’s main selling point was its convenience: instant, direct voice communication at a distance. Such convenience not only depended upon the efficiency of telephone operators, but also the efficiency of telephone users. Telephone users that failed to follow the telephone company’s rules and protocols – e.g., inarticulate, incompetent, inconsiderate – introduced costly friction into the system. Though scholars such as Claude Fischer have described the education of telephone users in terms of “etiquette,” this framing does not capture its broader implications. By equating telephone talk with efficiency, early telephone companies promoted an instrumental vision of human interaction, one that imagined ideal communication in terms of speed, economy, and individual control. This commercial vision of personal communication would shape future understandings of the telephone as a technology of personal convenience.

This paper examines early telephone industry efforts to produce efficient telephone users. Though many telephone users flouted or ignored industry rules and recommendations, which some scholars have interpreted as evidence of user agency, the cumulative effects of industry advertising, instructional texts, and corrective interventions administered by operators largely succeeded. By the 1920s Americans were habituated to the sociotechnical imperatives of telephone communication. They were attuned to its ring, answered promptly, followed discursive scripts when speaking, and performed the work of telephone talk with predictable efficiency.