tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70755828014365974332024-02-20T09:49:23.997+01:00Digital Telephone BookIncoherent and random notes on the social history of the telephoneElizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-27010253654654064152013-12-09T23:06:00.000+01:002013-12-09T23:06:41.666+01:00Back to basics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">End of radio silence.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">After a hiatus of nearly two years, I thought it was high time some more posts were written. I wish I could have contributed something much earlier but I had nothing worthy enough to see the light of day. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My initial interest was in the social aspect of telephone use, especially in its early years, and how people modified their social practices and indeed developed new customs when dealing with this new technology. These practices of the early 1900s are thrown into sharp relief when contrasted with our telephone behaviour today, specifically when using mobile phones. The fact that iPhones can actually be used to place phone calls seems to be incidental and they perform so many other tasks that "phone" is something of a misnomer. (The "tele-" prefix also seems to have been ditched somewhere along the way.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Nowadays
you'll probably only find a "traditional" telephone (i.e. with cables
attached and a dial) in your grandmother's house, or in a museum. Most
teenagers would be clueless if they had to use one of these relics,
simple though they are. So I was surprised to see these things for sale at my local discount supermarket the other week ...</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5UCTvnhps14/UqY4h-r1FoI/AAAAAAAAAj4/cmNnf81KCiY/s1600/silvercrest-telefonhoerer-regular.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5UCTvnhps14/UqY4h-r1FoI/AAAAAAAAAj4/cmNnf81KCiY/s320/silvercrest-telefonhoerer-regular.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">... a telephone handset (other colours available) that you plug into your mobile phone, to use when making/receiving phone calls. Innovative, no? I can't see it catching on, not when everyone uses headphones, which are easier to carry around. Just what were the chaps in the marketing department thinking of when they came up with this idea? Isn't the whole idea behind mobile telephony its, well, its mobility? Those early primitive mobiles reminiscent of house bricks (with the aerials sticking out) have migrated to the modern history museum (already!) and here we are reproducing obsolete technology to join forces with state-of-the-art, <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">€</span>500 smart phones.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Could this be a retro trend in technology, a nostalgic move? If so, then we might see the comeback of the telegram (sent by wire, not e-mail) and the return of the manual typewriter (<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23282308" target="_blank">the Kremlin</a> sees the security benefits).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">If you want a last-minute Christmas gift for the boss, or the mother-in-law, order your handset <a href="http://www.lidl.de/de/Handyzubehoer/SILVERCREST-Telefonhoerer" target="_blank">here</a> - only </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-25480906687518767962012-02-26T21:49:00.000+01:002012-02-26T21:49:28.662+01:00Connected to the electricity network<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There used to be a time when having mains electricity was a selling point for a house.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">These advertisements appeared in <i>The Times</i> of 18 September 1935. As you can imagine, many of the advertised properties for sale are rather large with rambling gardens and situated in the Home Counties. Each would need a whole battalion of servants to keep them in good working order - you could pick and choose a domestic servant from the small ads that covered pages 2 and 3 of the same newspaper. Running hot water would make life a lot easier for housekeepers and maids. The lady of the house wouldn't need anyone to boil up water for her morning bath anymore; she could just turn on the tap and out it would come.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I find it quaint that, even in 1935, people felt they had to mention the existence of an electricity connection. I wonder when they stopped mentioning it. It would also be interesting to learn when electricity in working-class houses finally became so common that people didn't need to mention it any more. </span></span></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-64320963436617971232012-02-21T23:20:00.000+01:002012-02-21T23:21:57.918+01:00Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As a theorist, Mumford is no better or worse than any other commentator on technology, past or present. I don't know whether it's good or bad that he had so many job titles: sociologist, historian, philosopher, student of architect, literary critic. It's good that he had access to so many varied fields of study - Mr Inter-disciplinary personified. Knowledge from one domain can enrich and provide a new perspective in another. But it's bad in the sense that it seems he flitted from one area to another, with a finger in every pie. Couldn't he stick at one subject and become an expert in that?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mumford's writing can provide some useful background to my research in the sense that he lived through the period under investigation. Whereas his ideas are certainly not representative, they do give a taste of contemporary notions on technology. He expresses some novel (to us) thoughts on communication in his <i>Technics and Civilization</i> (1934). Telecommunications meant that an individual acquired more and more contacts, which also made increasing demands on that person's time and attention. Nothing new here. But these demands, Mumford asserts, result in a weakening of "reflective thought and deliberate action." More time chatting on the phone means less time available for reading, writing and drawing. Isn't this true though of all/most forms of communications technology? Television, laptops, iPhones, internet all divert our attention away from reading/writing/drawing. I'm not sure how widespread television was in 1930s America, but certainly the telephone and radio were then the only devices capable of distracting middle-class Americans.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mumford believed the telephone was overused and that people made calls</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> for "personal intercourse"</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> too frequently. Instead, he recommended that lots of short calls could be easily condensed into a short written note. A hand-written note requires less time and effort (!) and consumes less "nervous energy." I'm not sure if Mumford is a bit behind his times with this concern about nervous energy. With the appearance of each technical innovation, doomsayers foresaw catastrophe for the human race. Racing along in the first steam train (or bicycle, or motor car) was bad for the heart and nervous system. Telephone operators suffered from nervous exhaustion and hysteria because they had to answer so many calls per hour and had subscribers yelling in their ears. The ringing of the telephone bell during dinner was bad for the digestion and delayed the postprandial brandy. And so on and so forth. The appearance of a new technology will always have its fanatic supporters and detractors. But I would have thought that such ideas about telephone communication would be long extinct by the 1930s. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mumford also complains of an overuse of inventions, even when there is no real need for them. (If they are there, then why not use them?) He gives the example of the phonograph. People stopped learning to play the violin, he claims, and listened to the phonograph instead. I don't know on what he bases this assertion, nor how he can equate the two activities. He implies that a live music performance is better than the "passive" activity of listening to records. In this respect he does have a point. But how many of us are able to perform Beethoven's <i>Moonlight Sonata</i>, say, or get Guns n' Roses to perform <i>November Rain</i> live in our living rooms when the mood takes us? This is the era of mass production. Ready-made products are being manufactured in greater number and the hard sell is in full force. Families are buying factory-produced jam - it's easier and quicker than making your own. The same holds true for making music.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In 1959 Mumford wrote an appraisal of <i>Technics and Civilization</i>, in which he resorts to a gendered image of various technologies. Technics with <u>dynamic</u> tools and machines, and "artificial extensions" (read: protuberances) of limbs, hands, teeth are masculine. On the other hand, containers of various kinds (read: receptacles for aforementioned protuberances) e.g. cisterns, irrigation canals, barns, reservoirs, are <u>passive</u> and feminine. They store potential energy and further "chemical, biological, and social reactions." I'm sure that with Mumford's background in literary criticism, he was well aware of the impact this binary opposition would impart.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Can it be that Mumford was alone in adhering to this gendered vision of technology? Maybe not, and if I can find others who voice similar attitudes then perhaps I can make the sweeping statement that 'people in the interwar years believed in 'male' and 'female' technologies.' But in locating these others, I fear I am being guilty of having a theory and looking for evidence to support it. </span></span><br />
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I have been following E-Bay auctions of late, particularly for manual typewriters (the last manufacturer recently closed for good) and telephones (with dials and cables attached, not the mobile variety). There are some real bargains to be had, if you're a bit knowledgeable about each item's history and rarity. <br />
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Some sellers try to appear naive: "I cleared out my grandmother's attic and found this old typewriter lying around. No idea what it's worth but starting price is 100 Euros." Others attach adjectives like "antique" or "vintage" to telephones that are only 20-30 years old in the hope of attracting the high rollers.<br />
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It is precisely this arbitrary use of descriptions of age that bothers me. I can understand a seller wanting to present his wares in the best possible light but when the (nearly new) article is accompanied by a photograph, then a description like "uralt" immediately comes across as incongruous and disingenuous.<br />
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Perhaps the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of what exactly we mean by terms like "antique" or "historic". Or maybe it's a matter of perspective: There are common, household articles that used to be part of my daily life and are merely 'old' or 'outmoded.' For a sixteen-year old, however, such articles could well be genuine antiques.</div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-19186985092346021042011-08-24T22:41:00.001+02:002011-08-24T22:42:14.082+02:00Life without a telephone<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A recent house move left me without a landline connection for a whole week - and all this despite meticulous advance planning. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The problem apparently was located in a local exchange but the company (not) providing me with a telephone connection kept assuring me that their computers showed my telephone was connected and working. They never took me seriously when I tried to convince them that their computers were wrong and I was right. The fact that these numerous "service" calls were conducted via my mobile phone failed to make any impression on them. If they took the simple expedient step of ringing my landline number, they would soon find out that the line was as dead as a dodo and their computers in need of a serious overhaul. Luckily they saw the error of their ways by the end of the week and my telephone now works perfectly.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A few days after full service was restored, I received a phone call from a very nice lady in customer relations: she was ringing to check that my telephone was working properly - she rang on my landline phone. If only they had done this on day one, in the fashion of the early telephone operators who used to make daily telephone calls to subscribers to check if the lines were working.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I'm not a fanatic telephone user - neither mobile nor landline - but I must confess to feeling isolated and cut off from the rest of society during my telephone-less week. Not just cut off in the sense that I was unreachable by phone for a week but in the sense that, without a telephone connection in the society that I live in, you're not considered fully part of that society. Many public bodies and services ask for your landline number first; a mobile number is useful but a landline presupposes a fixed address with a householder who is registered in all the correct places. So with a landline connection, you feel more 'permanent' and an established member of the community. When people ring your number, they know precisely in which building you are located. I had to rely on mobile telephony but never felt really safe with it - units might run out during a long phone call, the battery could go flat, I could lose the charger, or quite simply forget to take the phone with me when leaving the house.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">What made our grandparents feel permanent and 'connected' to their communities before the telephone became commonplace? Or did they not need to feel connected? As an experiment, going cold turkey with telephone use could tell us all a lot about how we view our own personal use and need of the telephone (in a similar fashion to going a whole week or month without television or Internet). But we can never experience pre-telephony life in this way - what has been learned cannot be unlearned.</span></span></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-26027165385634863502011-06-19T00:09:00.003+02:002011-06-19T00:21:52.539+02:00Manhattan, 1975<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">A fire breaks out in a New York telephone exchange and is allowed to consume cables and equipment for fifteen hours. (Incidentally, when were fire sprinklers invented?) You can well imagine the damage caused by a day-long fire: 90,000 customers in the Manhattan area had to make do without a telephone connection for more than three weeks.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This incident has gone down in telecommunications history as an epic example of what happens to people when they are deprived of their landline telephones. A study was conducted by Wurtzel and Turner<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7075582801436597433#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> which analysed how subscribers reacted to suddenly being without a telephone. I know of no other similar incident on such a grand scale as this 1975 event and that’s probably why the impact of the fire, and the results of this survey are still cited today <i>ad nauseum</i>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">How often do we get the opportunity to question a large group of people who are deprived of their means of communication with the outside world? If such a fire occurred today, I don’t think any subscribers would even notice: they are so attached to their mobiles and e-mails that the loss of a landline is neither here nor there. So an event such as this one in Manhattan was unique. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The authors introduce their analysis with an acknowledgement that the academic community couldn’t care less about the telephone’s history. They then proceed to discuss a few academics’ basic assumptions and self-evident truths, on which they base various concepts. Examples will follow below but first, I wonder whether this lack of interest in any way connects to what I can only term a slipshod method of obtaining results? Writers often make sweeping statements about telephone use, or its perception by its users, and then use this assumption to construct a conclusion. The classic example for me will always be: ‘The telephone saved the sanity of farmers’ wives.’ No one has yet produced a farmer’s wife that has uttered these words herself. Once this idea enters the debate then everyone uses it as a given and builds further on it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now to the examples of assumptions I mentioned above. </span></div><ol start="1" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; margin-top: 0cm;" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">The function of an urban, domestic telephone is to reduce loneliness, increase feelings of security, and maintain contact with family/friends.</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">The telephone “facilitates dispersion” of family members: “I’ll take that job 3,000 miles away – I can always ring the folks at home once a week.”</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">The telephone breaks down our urban lifespaces into “psychological networks”</span></li>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What problems do I have with these assumptions?</span></div><ol start="1" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; margin-top: 0cm;" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Granted, these are <i>some</i> of the functions an urban, domestic telephone can perform, but not the only ones. And certainly these functions vary according to the gender, class, race, etc. of the user. Why - and if so, how - should the function of a telephone differ in an urban setting to that of a rural telephone? </span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">I’ve said this somewhere else (can’t remember where). People are more mobile today than previous generations. They change cities/countries/continents for a variety of reasons: to find work, begin studies, follow a sweetheart … These are big changes in a person’s life and he weighs up the pros and cons before committing himself. I’ve emigrated twice and left friends/family behind but I’ve never said: ‘thank goodness there’s the telephone so that I can ring home now and again. It doesn’t matter, then, that I’ll live/work too far away to see them.’ This factor comes at the bottom of a person’s list of arguments.</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Is the telephone <i>solely</i> responsible for creating these psychological networks? Certainly today there are numerous other factors that play a role in creating these networks, for example, e-mail, social network sites.</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">The survey authors formulated the questions to be put to Manhattan subscribers specifically to address the assumptions they had. If, for instance, we believe the telephone reduces loneliness then we should expect to see subscribers complaining about isolation and uneasiness during their three-week bout of unconnectedness. I would have liked to see the questions for myself. From the article, it seems that people were not given the chance to express themselves in their own words, rather they had to agree/disagree with set statements – putting words in their mouths. This is much like the tricks of pollsters during electioneering who ask questions such as: Which politician do you think would make the best prime minister, Mr A or Mr B? They never give you the option of answering: both are crap.</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Finally, it’s the matter of having assumptions. I think it’s dangerous to assume anything in the first place. Collect data, sort, analyse, conclude.</span></li>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some other details emerged that made an impression on me, although I don’t know yet whether these are significant details or not.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">About 25% of all New York telephones then were ex-directory. I would be interested to learn if this percentage has changed at all over the decades and if there is any difference by country. Having an unlisted number, I believe, changes the nature of your telephone network. You are no longer freely available to every Tom, Dick and Harry who has access to a telephone directory. Instead, when the telephone rings, you know it can only be someone to whom you have given your number, i.e. someone known to you personally. Otherwise, it could be a wrong number. This changes your telephone into something akin to a private, internal network.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Then there’s the question of actual numbers of subscribers surveyed. Researchers were given the telephone numbers of 600 people they could contact, randomly selected. Of those 600, 319 were eligible to participate (the others were, for example, business premises). From the 319, only 190 actually completed the survey – some people refused, some people were never at home when researchers rang. 190 people out of c.1,500,000 Manhattan residents<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7075582801436597433#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> doesn’t seem very many (0.0126% of the Manhattan population to be precise) and if we place the 190 guinea pigs in the context of New York city’s population, then the proportion disappears into infinity.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I believe a similar survey conducted with respondents from a variety of geographical regions – urban, suburban, rural – would yield different results. It would also be good to compare the US with Britain/Europe. Utopian, I know, but one can dream.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">All these people lost their telephone connection due to a company accident. They were forced to manage without a telephone. Would they have given different answers if they had never lost their connection, that it to say, just answering questions generally about how they use their telephones?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Residents really didn’t have many options during their three weeks of abstention. Remember what it was like in 1975? These people had to resort to the emergency street telephones made available to them or use the telephone at work. Ten per cent of respondents actually sat down and wrote letters. In essence, unless they had access to a telephone elsewhere, there was no other substitute for <i>immediate interaction</i>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The authors believe that if additional research is conducted what will emerge from respondents is a sense of <i>frustration</i> at not being able to make calls. Reading between the lines, I interpret this to mean: I want the service to be always available, whether I need it or not.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In conclusion – I’m not disputing the validity of these findings, rather the absolute nature of the authors’ assertions – ‘the telephone reduces loneliness,’ ‘it disperses families.’ It may be a fault in how the writers word their theories but to me it comes across as absolute, categorical and allowing of no other alternatives.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br clear="all" /></span> <br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7075582801436597433#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> Alan H. Wurtzel, and Colin Turner, “What Missing the Telephone Means,” <i>Journal of Communication</i> 27 (2) June 1977: 48-57.</span></div></div><div id="ftn2"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7075582801436597433#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> According to Wikipedia.</span></div></div></div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-26187130208727734572011-06-11T21:57:00.001+02:002011-06-11T22:16:07.310+02:00The communication practices of the Victorians ... spiced up with a scandalous divorce<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">I have trawled through a handful of etiquette manuals, looking for advice to readers on telephone use. All in vain. The British publications pointedly avoid any mention of the new invention, even those published in later years after 1910. The contents of these manuals are oh so predictable – visiting, invitations to balls/dinners/teas, weddings, funerals. It seems these were the core events in one’s social calendar and members of the monied classes had to be able to negotiate their way through this minefield. These were fixed, long established rituals which people observed in order to maintain the traditions of their class. (Whether these were ‘invented traditions’ à la Hobsbawm is a subject for another thesis.) </span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Why should lords and ladies incorporate the upstart telephone into their routines and upset tradition? The people who read conduct manuals were probably the ones in a position to own a telephone, but that doesn’t mean they would use the instrument to conduct their social affairs. It might be useful for ringing up one’s business premises or for ordering coal, but such an instrument, ‘tainted’ as it were by business matters, was inappropriate for inviting guests to dinner. I think remnants of this attitude are still visible today. There are some aspects of social business that you just don’t conduct over the telephone: wedding invitations, for example, or ‘Dear John’ letters. I’ve never heard of a ‘Dear John’ telephone call or of someone being notified of a forthcoming wedding by telephone. Well, they might, but they always send a fancy card by post later.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lady Colin’s manual is no different to all the others of the era. It makes no mention whatsoever of the telephone. It is as if it didn’t exist. She readily acknowledges, however, that modern life is hectic and that there is little time to devote to letter writing. How much time she would save if she used the telephone. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Regarding domestic use, telephone companies said it was alright to ring up traders to order supplies for the household. Not so Lady Colin. She advises writing a short letter, and even provides an example: “Mrs. Maitland will be obliged by Mr. Scott sending her 6lb. of tea.” Admittedly, this method is not as speedy as a phone call, but if you can send a boy round to the shop with the note, you would still get same-day service. And you would avoid the unpleasant necessity of having to actually converse with tradespeople. Good houses had separate tradesmen entrances for deliveries, out of sight at the back of the building. So we don’t want to invite tradesmen directly into our parlours via the telephone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The writer makes further mention of post cards. Towards the end of the century sending postcards became a popular form of communication among ordinary people. Postage for a card was cheaper than a letter and with multiple deliveries in many large towns, it was possible sometimes to send a card and receive a reply on the same day. You could say that post cards were to Victorians what Twitter is to us today. Space was limited (you couldn’t add an extra sheet, as with letters) so messages had to be concise. Lady Colin, however, advises against them for personal matters: post cards are only to be used for business transactions. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Privacy was a major concern for these people. Post cards entering and leaving a house would be seen by servants and the information written on them freely visible to all and sundry. Even more paranoid, to my mind, is Lady C advising letter writers not to write their return address on the backs of envelopes. Why? Because servants at the receiving end would know who was writing to their employers. Compare this with today’s business correspondence: every bill or official letter I receive is blazoned with the sender’s full details. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I written a lot about communication and correspondence but very little about the telephone. That’s okay because we are gradually building a picture of how people at the turn of the century communicated with each other and what attitudes they held towards each method. Given what we now know about, say, letter writing or postal services, it’s easy to envisage how difficult it was for promoters of the telephone to convince the public of its utility. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I suspect that the telephone eventually caught on, not so much because people realized it was a good communications device, but rather because the other means of communication deteriorated. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A final comment about the author – Lady Colin was a victim of the hypocrisy and double standards of the day. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Elizabeth_Blood">Wikipedia</a> has all the sordid details and there’s also information <a href="http://www.ladycolincampbell.co.uk/index.html">here </a>written by Lady Colin’s biographer.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Elizabeth_Blood"><br />
</a></span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.ladycolincampbell.co.uk/index.html"></a></span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Her divorce proceedings caused great agitation in high society and the same society ostracized her for her transgression. Instead of quietly retiring into obscurity, Lady C took to writing and journalism and mixed in literary and artistic circles. How fitting then that she should edit a book dictating good manners to the people who vilified her. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lady Colin Campbell. <i>Etiquette of Good Society. </i>London: Cassell and Company, 1893.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-45239996578062727562011-06-11T00:32:00.002+02:002011-06-11T00:41:21.318+02:00Victorian call centres<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">Victorians had qualities which mark them out even to this day: thrift, hard work, a practical nature, a mentality of self-help. Such qualities, I believe, are borne out of the nature of their society; there was no social security network, for example, to go to when they fell on hard times. If there was no family to help, then people in distress would have to rely on their own resources.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Widows were especially vulnerable. </span>Losing a husband meant they had to become the breadwinner overnight. For women of the lower classes, going out to work was not so remarkable and it was relatively easy to earn money. The major forms of employment were domestic service or factory work. For the middle class woman, however, paid employment was simply not an option. The most she could hope for was a position as governess or companion to old ladies. Both meant living in and a drop in social status. And the money earned would have been peanuts.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One highly practical solution for such widows was the practice of giving them a sewing machine as a present. This was not charity and allowed the widow to become self-sufficient. Working from home, the widow maintains respectability, and performs a task considered appropriate for women. She could receive orders for new garments or domestic textiles, or take in alterations.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But why bother with a sewing machine? Close needlework ruins your eyesight (remember, they only had gas or oil lamps then) and you get a hump back bending over your work. Some projects would take days or weeks to finish. A much better alternative to the donated sewing machine is – wait for it – a telephone. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A writer identifying herself (I think we can safely assume the writer is female) as “Self Help” sent in a suggestion to an 1884 periodical,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7075582801436597433#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> saying that the gift of a telephone connection to the central exchange is an inordinately better income generator than a sewing machine. Here are some of the ways the widow can exploit her telephone (and simultaneously exploit her friends):</span></div><ol start="1" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; margin-top: 0cm;" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Send out flyers to her lady friends that she can now order goods on their behalf from local traders, who are also connected by telephone. They might order the following: flowers, fish, theatre tickets, coal, wine. The writer believes that traders would be willing to pay the widow 10% commission for all orders she puts their way.</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">She could allow merchants and their employees to use her telephone for business purposes. They pay a few pennies to the widow and telephone the office to say they would be an hour late. </span></li>
</ol><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Given a choice, I would opt for the telephone. It’s much easier than labouring over a sewing machine that’s not even electric. Turning your front parlour into a one-woman call centre has a lot going for it – intense networking with friends and local business people; no commuting every day; being at home to look after children.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This idea surfaced during the telephone's first decade in Britain. It shows amazing entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking on how to put a new technology to good use.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I still maintain that the technological practices and gadgets that we consider ultra modern and super digital are not in the slightest bit new or original – they are merely faster/bigger/cheaper versions of what the Victorians did before us.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br clear="all" /></span> <br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7075582801436597433#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> <i>Work and leisure: a magazine devoted to the interests of women</i>. London: F. Kirby, 1884.</span></div></div></div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-43209370146393810142011-06-09T16:12:00.000+02:002011-06-09T16:12:25.135+02:00Sex discrimination, in the opposite direction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</style> <![endif]--> </div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“There are now 120 women in the Berlin telephone exchanges.<span> </span>It has been decided to use only women in the future, as it has been found that their voices are much more audible than men’s, owing to the higher pitch.”</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The American Magazine</i>, 1891</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">… and, of course, you don’t have to pay a woman such high wages, as you would a man.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-26612429103218734712011-06-08T12:07:00.001+02:002011-06-08T12:09:45.276+02:00Just a copper wire<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lT44wGmW6js/Te9HXOoEj7I/AAAAAAAAAZw/dWRoSO653hw/s1600/1888+Blizzard%252C+New+York.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lT44wGmW6js/Te9HXOoEj7I/AAAAAAAAAZw/dWRoSO653hw/s200/1888+Blizzard%252C+New+York.jpg" width="141" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New York, 1888</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></h3><h3 style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: normal;">UNDER A TELEPHONE POLE</span></span></b></i></h3><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I am a copper wire slung in the air,<br />
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.<br />
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:<br />
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the<br />
tears, the work and want,<br />
Death and laughter of men and women passing through<br />
me, carrier of your speech,<br />
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the<br />
shine drying,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> A copper wire.</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Carl Sandburg composed this short poem in 1916. In just a few brief lines, he manages to capture the pure simplicity of telephony - one single copper wire strung up in the street, which carries all of human experience: life and death, love and hate. Conveying human speech, the wire itself speaks with its (his? her?) own voice in the first person to us directly.</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">And what a refreshing change to read something from this era that talks of "men and women" and not the bland, generic "Mankind" or "Man." Of course, when contemporaries wrote of mankind, especially in the context of telecommunications, they usually inferred men, excluding women. Sandburg redresses the balance by including women as telephone users.</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Incidentally, his mention of wires being exposed to the elements brings to mind those epic old photographs of telephone wires collapsing in snow storms. Derricks perched on rooftops throughout urban centres were easily felled when the wind was strong. They were loaded with wires (one for each subscriber) and engineers had to start from scratch when the whole structure came down.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span> </div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-89184240330909896782011-06-06T19:56:00.000+02:002011-06-06T19:56:07.639+02:00"Selling Talk"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I came across another little gem in the Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company publication, "Telephone Facts" of 1915. Remember, this is a journal the company sent out to its business customers (telephone companies) who were in the market for telephones, switchboards, and sundry accessories.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Strategically positioned on the first inside page is a short sales pitch that salesmen can use to market the telephone to potential subscribers. What is interesting is that the piece does not focus at all on the technical aspects of the telephone apparatus, its durability, technological features, innovation and such like. Instead, the only selling point the salesman should emphasise is <i>talk</i>. This is the commodity that the telephone man deals in. Even more surprising (to me, at least) is the fact that the writer mentions that it doesn't matter if the talk is important or trivial, it is still significant.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ads such as these link to Claude Fischer's discussion about how American telephone companies suddenly discovered sociability and how, surprise surprise, encouraging people to be sociable was good for business. We then see a gradual turnaround in telephone companies' attitudes: they ceased promoting the telephone purely for 'serious' business use and stopped berating women who insisted on abusing the telephone for mere trivia. Now gossip was good.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Everyone involved in the telephone business, from lineman, contract man to operator, was reminded: "you sell talk."</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is all well and good and highly interesting, but what happened in Britain? It is well known that the telephone service in Britain was grossly under-developed (and dare I even say, backward?) in comparison. Certainly, in 1915 there was no massive, national advertising campaign undertaken by the General Post Office. War concerns were more pressing, but even after the war, it would be a <i>long</i> time before any concerted efforts were made to promote the service. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">How the GPO promoted the telephone service is one huge area still awaiting intensive research. I can't wait to get started!!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-81204250047244260552011-06-05T18:03:00.002+02:002011-12-17T18:55:16.880+01:00"Has the telephone killed the old-fashioned love letter?"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Apparently, yes. The 1915 American trade magazine <i>Telephone Facts</i> hosted an article which counts the costs of telephony for courting couples. The anonymous author acknowledges that a young lady may appreciate the conveniences of a domestic telephone connection, but this comes at a price, the price being a packet of letters from her beau, tied with a ribbon (perhaps with dried flowers), stashed at the back of her drawer. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">An ephemeral telephone call leaves no trace, moods are misinterpreted, details of the conversation may be forgotten. A tangible letter, however, with visible signs left by its creator, can be re-read, touched, smelled.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A telephone call is easy for the boy: he can just ring up for a chat on an impulse, but sitting down to compose a letter requires time and effort. And he'd much rather hear his beloved's voice over the "talking wire" than receive a dozen letters from her. The same cannot be said for the girl. She too would love to hear his voice but there are disadvantages: crossed lines, eavesdroppers, a hundred pairs of curious ears listening in on the party line. (Admittedly, the writer's sexist bias is showing through; the same arguments are, of course, valid if the roles are reversed.)</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The article was obviously penned by an agony aunt or an arbiter of public manners. Those few etiquette manuals that devoted space to telephone use, relegated its use to informal circles. Certainly where courtship is concerned, a visit or an outing could be chaperoned, but not so a telephone call.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think there is a grain of truth in the writer's assertions. A phone call from a loved one is always welcome, but a letter or card, however brief and simple, requires so much more effort on the writer's part. Aside from the difficulty in choosing the right words, you have to find writing paper, pen, envelope, a stamp, and then go out and find a postbox (if it's the butler's day off). It is this extra effort that makes the letter so valuable to the receiver, even though it is not consciously thought about.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It is for these reasons that I treasure all the letters I've received from friends and family and store them safe with my photographs. I don't think we can say the same for messages of endearment sent by SMS.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></div>
<a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4586824/Telephones_and_Love_Letters" title="Wordle: Telephones and Love Letters"><img alt="Wordle: Telephones and Love Letters" src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/4586824/Telephones_and_Love_Letters" style="border: 1px solid #ddd; padding: 4px;" /></a>
</div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-45368204571067868722011-06-04T17:03:00.000+02:002011-06-04T17:03:47.456+02:00“Fass dich kurz!”<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is a truth universally acknowledged that the price we pay for each telephone call we make determines the quality of the call and its contents. And by ‘quality’ I don’t mean whether the connection is successful or if the line is scratchy.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Let me elaborate by drawing a comparison.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Then</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the old days, when domestic telephones used to be situated in hallways and before multiplexing made its appearance, telephone users were more cautious about making a call. If they did eventually decide that, yes, the call was necessary, they made sure they got off the line as quickly as possible. By today’s standards, the cost of making phone calls then was much more expensive. With charges determined by call duration and geographical destination, short local calls were cheaper. And if you had a lot to say to someone who lived on another continent, then write a letter.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In my first job I worked in an office where every telephone was plastered with stickers reminding people to ring after 1.00 p.m. when off-peak calls were cheaper. You were only justified in making morning calls in life-or-death situations. Mornings were always blissfully quiet, but the afternoons erupted as all the telephones went crazy and rang non-stop. Try telling your office workers today not to make calls during morning hours.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My supervisor remembers making telephone calls as a teenager (again in her home’s hallway) and having her father shout at her to be brief. Anecdotal evidence shows that this is by no means an unusual experience in the early twentieth century. In those days, time really was money.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now that I think about it, making phone calls in the earlier decades must have been very much like using Twitter: you had to be short and succinct to get your message across in as few words as possible. No waffling on for hours on end.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Now</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Most people choose to pay a flat rate for their telephone connection, mobile or landline. Quite often they get the whole package – telephone, internet, television. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">When you’re talking on the telephone, your mind is free of the torment of the ticking clock. You can talk for two minutes or two hours, the price is the same. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You no longer have to think twice about whether the call is really essential or not. You can ring someone up to be purely sociable, to catch up on gossip, or just because you’ve got absolutely nothing better to do and want to ease the boredom of a long train journey (and have no reading material to hand). Those bores that use their mobiles to drone on in public places about their inane existence are well known examples.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>The comparison</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now I come to my point about call quality. If the cost of the telephone call is cheap, you don’t give a second thought to lifting up the receiver. It doesn’t seem such a waste then to use the telephone for trivial reasons. With timed, expensive calls, on the other hand, you really question the necessity of making that call. Anyone who has ever had to make an important call from a public phone box with just one 10p coin will understand the implications.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps there is an element of technological determinism here. The nature of our telephone network (and its pricing structure) shapes not only our communications practices but also our attitudes towards that network.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’ll finish off with a salutary lesson for <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i_UI5ZqmZKxLz9DL8CSpxjSTL5kA?docId=CNG.e1e3011dfa5c9e06530678b2c4c69dcc.471">ardent telephone users</a>. Last month Amtrak officials threw a woman off a night train after passengers complained that she had been speaking loudly on her phone, for <i>15 hours</i>. I’m left wondering – what on earth did this woman find to talk about for 15 hours?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-45349273137493378002011-05-13T19:32:00.001+02:002011-05-13T19:42:46.605+02:00Franz Göll’s cultural capital<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">Reading an account of Berliner Franz Göll’s life (1899-1984), I imagine him as a bit of a dandy. He was quite a clothes horse; he bought fedora hats (nine of them in the space of seven years), gloves, bow ties and all the accoutrements of the middle class lifestyle that he aspired to. But it is not Göll’s sartorial elegance that impresses me – he was after all a bachelor and could indulge himself as he pleased – but rather his trips to the cinema. The numbers are impressive. Beginning in 1919 he went to the cinema 19 times (once every 2.7 weeks). Over the years this increased until 1926, when he made 74 visits to the cinema, once and sometimes twice a week! Another diarist of the Weimar era (Klemperer) reports that <i>every day</i> 2 million Germans visited the cinema.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">I tried to imagine myself doing what Göll did; visiting the cinema at least once, maybe twice a week. Without a television at home and perhaps no radio, the cinema would be my only source of entertainment and information. News reels, of course, would have lent an air of currency to a visit. Did they change the programme so frequently that I could see a different film every time? Even by visiting cinemas in other neighbourhoods? And were the films so good that I would be prepared to fork out for an evening’s entertainment something from my modest wage? </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">In comparison, today’s cinematic offerings are not that appetizing and the complexes throughout the city all show more or less the same films. (If you’re lucky, you might find an alternative, non-Hollywood picture house tucked away in some back alley that shows European productions, but this would be an exception.) </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">I can only think that Göll was trying to increase his share of cultural capital. When he wasn't visiting the cinema, he attended concerts, operettas, and theatre - comedy and heavier stuff. I don't think he spent many evenings at home after work. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">Would I want to go to the cinema every week, or even twice a week? I don’t think so, even if the films shown were Oscar-winning material and my favourite genre. I couldn’t keep it up for a whole year and would give up after a month. What was it that kept Göll motivated? It might have been a novelty in the beginning but surely not after seven years. Göll kept a film diary but sadly this has disappeared; we’ll never know which films he saw and what his impressions were. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">A postscript - Göll died in 1984 but stopped writing his journals in 1982. Why did he give up his writing, something that he had been doing for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sixty-six</i> years? One possible reason could be the colour television be bought a couple of years earlier. Could be coincidental, but I think not.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times;">Fritzsche, Peter. <i>The Turbulent World of Franz Göll. An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century</i>. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011.</span><br />
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</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-44547755792511678222011-04-21T15:32:00.001+02:002011-04-21T15:35:45.733+02:00Heard, but not seen – invisible technologies in the home<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Our homes are filled with no end of technologies, simple and complicated. Most people, however, would rather not see these devices, or at least have them disguised in some way in order to blend in with the furnishings. Here are just some examples.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Light switches and electrical sockets come in functional white plastic but also a multitude of other colours and materials to suit; Georgian brass, for instance.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the days when domestic telephones came attached to a cable, you could buy one in any colour of the rainbow. You could always find the right one to match the wallpaper. Today’s cordless versions are usually lost somewhere under a pile, so the colour is largely irrelevant.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Televisions that came in wooden cabinets, so that when the doors were closed, it looked like a drinks cabinet. Today’s fancy screens that are mounted on living room walls resemble modern art.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Radios too were housed in cabinets.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Let’s not forget the current fashion for retro style products – candlestick telephones, wartime wireless sets, fridges that look like they came straight out of a 40s American diner – the latest technology but dressed up like an antique.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There are still many housewives from the old school who cover their ‘black boxes’ with pretty lace cloths and other fripperies so that they blend in more. A small digression here: one of the reasons why my friend Margaret got divorced was because her ex didn’t like her putting table cloths on top of his new two-metre-high stereo loudspeakers. He said it ruined the sound effect. She said they were an eyesore. Anyway … Household technologies are not meant to be seen for what they really are.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You may also recall a <a href="http://digital-telephone-book.blogspot.com/2011/01/telephone-screens.html">post</a> that gave homemakers instructions on how to make decorative telephone screens, with matching covers for the telephone directory. Useful though these items were, they were too ugly to be on public display.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://digital-telephone-book.blogspot.com/2011/01/telephone-screens.html"><br />
</a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the same era in Weimar Germany, Walter Gropius advocated a concealment of domestic technologies. Yes, water, electricity, heating, telephones and suchlike are vital but we should not be confronted with evidence of their presence. In a Bauhaus home these functions should be invisible. “One wants to be served, but the presence of the servant should not be allowed to make us feel uncomfortable.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="DE">Walter Gropius, Paul Schultze-Naumberg. “Wer hat Recht? Traditionelle Baukunst oder Bauen in neuen Formen.” <i>Uhu</i>, no.7 (April 1926)</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-82111238899938269832011-04-21T13:13:00.000+02:002011-04-21T13:17:12.258+02:00Redslob's string telephone<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cultural historian Edwin Redslob (1884-1973), like Walter Benjamin, wrote a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=VhpoAAAAMAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Edwin+Redslob%22&dq=inauthor:%22Edwin+Redslob%22&hl=en&ei=cQiwTSGF2uMG0Pqh5gs&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CE8Q6AEwCQ">retrospective</a></span> of his childhood years, where he talks of the arrival of new technologies in his family. (Also described <a href="http://books.google.com/books?ei=SQywTf73NMnU4wazg_yBDA&ct=result&id=k_HiAAAAMAAJ&dq=quellen+zur+alltagsgeschichte+der+deutschen+1871-1914&q=fernsprech#search_anchor">here</a>.)</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=VhpoAAAAMAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Edwin+Redslob%22&dq=inauthor:%22Edwin+Redslob%22&hl=en&ei=cQiwTSGF2uMG0Pqh5gs&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CE8Q6AEwCQ"></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">He remembers the coming of electric light into his home.<span> </span>Up until then, the family used kerosene lamps in all the rooms. A line of them was set up in the hallway, ready for use once it became dark. Despite the smell and inconvenience, kerosene lamps are intimately tied in his memory with hearing his father read.<span> </span>After supper, father would read out loud to the family, while other members would draw or work on their stamp collection, under the dim, but warm, glow of the lamp.<span> </span>These were “cosy hours” in Redslob’s childhood memories.<span> </span>In contrast, electric lighting was “unpleasantly bright.”<span> </span>The light illuminated too much – not only did it light up the room well, but it also dispersed the cosiness of old, like bright sunshine dissipating morning mist.<span> </span>Electricity was expensive for the family in the beginning and it seemed counterproductive to dim the light bulbs or use a lamp shade.<span> </span>His father, however, maintained the tradition of a kerosene lamp for use in his own study.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Redslob also remembers his first encounter with the telephone.<span> </span>These were of the kind that were affixed to the wall and you used a crank handle to call the exchange.<span> </span>Accompanying his father to the bank one day, the clerk showed the boy the new telephone and said he could make a telephone call.<span> </span>Young Redslob was confused – he didn’t know anyone he could call, nor what he should say.<span> </span>The clerk suggested he ring the local hotel to ask if Director Müller had arrived from Berlin.<span> </span>The boy spoke into the telephone and a hotel porter told him that indeed the director had arrived.<span> </span>Once outside in the street, Redslob sneaked away from his father and ran to the hotel that he had just telephoned.<span> </span>It took him at least five minutes.<span> </span>He was amazed at the time difference between telephoning the hotel and running to the hotel to speak to the porter in person.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">His father bought him a toy telephone – two cardboard boxes joined with a piece of string.<span> It kept </span>Redslob and his brother amused for hours.<span> </span>They climbed up their garden trees and tried to hold a telephone conversation, but without much success of course.<span> </span>Simple face-to-face conversation was much easier, he observes.<span> </span>But he still enjoyed his new ‘telephone’; in common with most boys, he liked it because it was modern and technical.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-15662972786170013572011-04-20T19:04:00.000+02:002011-04-20T19:04:28.069+02:00An American in London<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</style> <![endif]--> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Arthur Warren.<span> </span><i>London Days.<span> </span>A Book of Reminiscences</i>.<span> </span>Little, Brown, 1920.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Arthur Warren was the long-standing London correspondent for the Boston Herald.<span> </span>In 1920 he published his reminiscences, <i>London Days, </i>where he discussed a variety of subjects: his memories and impressions of Tennyson, Gladstone, Parnell; his struggle to become a journalist, and suchlike.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Warren first set foot in London in 1878, as a naïve 18-year-old fresh off the boat from New York.<span> </span>He begins his narrative with ‘First glimpses of London’ with predictable references to Dickensian atmosphere, fog and gas lamps.<span> </span>This theme continues throughout – presumably he thinks this is what his readers expect/want to read.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As you read through <i>London Days</i>, it soon becomes clear that Warren enjoys what I can only describe as a masochistic enjoyment of past hardships.<span> </span>He maligns contemporary passengers on transatlantic voyages who enjoy on-board luxuries like deckchairs, barber shops, electric bells and good dinners.<span> </span>Warren had none of these on his first Atlantic crossing, and he spent the entire voyage being seasick in his cabin.<span> </span>His depiction of the austere conditions on his own ship bring to mind Ahab’s <i>Pequod</i>, for reasons I know not.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Another aspect of past life that he enjoyed was the absence of speedy travel.<span> </span>In the days before the internal combustion engine and electricity (then the only thing electric was the telegraph), Warren enjoyed going places – slowly and leisurely – and he laments the loss of this “charm.”<span> </span>“We were not in a hurry then.”<span> </span>He sees the slow pace as something that made London a “more livable place.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Strangely, one hardship of London life that he finds intolerable is the lack of heating and hot water in public and private buildings.<span> </span>He finds English buildings damp and chilly, and everyone suffers from rheumatism.<span> </span>American homes, on the other hand, are warm and dry.<span> </span>A heated building is such an exception that the fact is advertised.<span> </span>In this respect he has a point.<span> </span>Many advertisements of the era for hotels, for example, stress the fact that bedrooms and public rooms are heated. Today, this strikes us as peculiar and a modern analogous ad might read 'All rooms equipped with beds.'</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">He engages in the national pastime of bashing London architecture (nothing new here).<span> </span>“Could anything be uglier than the National Gallery?” he asks rhetorically.<span> </span>For him, “the Methodist mountain in Westminster is frozen pudding.”<span> </span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Warren demonstrates a touch of nationalistic chauvinism.<span> </span>He thinks London’s buildings are the worst in Europe, apart from those in Germany.<span> </span>Communications are poor, as the telephone is “almost unknown to-day” (1920) in comparison to New York’s statistics.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">If life in London was so abysmal, you might wonder why he spent his entire adult life working there.<span> </span>I think the answer lies in the fact that his job allowed him to rub shoulders with the great and the good of British society.<span> </span>A few of the names that he drops include Lord Tennyson, Gladstone and Lord Kelvin.<span> </span>He was acquainted with some of the notables he writes about; with others he barely knew them.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Even with a primary text such as this, written during the era under examination, one must be ultra cautious.<span> </span>In theory, Warren should be writing objectively, since he is a journalist.<span> </span>We see that the reality is somewhat different.<span> </span>The author earns his living as a wordsmith and needs all his skills in rhetoric and presentation.<span> </span>Let us not forget as well that Warren wrote his book when he was sixty.<span> </span>How have the intervening forty-odd years coloured his judgement and memory?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the end, I ask myself why Warren could find nothing positive to say about his environment in 1920.<span> </span>Were things really that bad, even two years after the end of World War I?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Why was he more nostalgic about the past?<span> </span>How can people look back at the past and see it only through rose-tinted spectacles?<span> </span>Once you have tasted the present and experienced the material comforts that new technologies afford, how can you still yearn for the time before?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-42005026937582322032011-04-18T13:59:00.001+02:002011-04-21T15:37:55.415+02:00“Berlin Childhood Around 1900”<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the 1930s Walter Benjamin began writing his memories of childhood life in Berlin at the turn of the century. His collection was only published after his death.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One cannot in any way describe Benjamin’s account as an autobiography, to do so would be a slight. It is more an assembly of portraits or vignettes of places, objects and experiences that made a lasting impression on the writer. He devotes one such essay to the telephone, hence my interest.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Benjamin maintains the illusion of freshness that comes from a child describing something new and wondrous in his home, but at the same time tempers this with the experience and maturity of adulthood. These two aspects of his narrative merge together seamlessly.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In his discussion of the telephone, Benjamin orders household objects into a hierarchy. In the beginning, items like chandeliers, potted palms, and fire screens enjoyed pride of place in the front rooms of his family’s home. With the passage of time, however, these “died a natural death” and were displaced by newer objects. The telephone, previously “exposed to die” could now make its appearance in the front room, which was now cleaner and brighter. The rooms are now occupied by a younger generation (who presumably understand and tolerate the new technology better than their elders) who have brought the telephone in from the wilderness of the dark hallway.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Benjamin remembers how the telephone was condemned in the beginning to sit between the dirty-linen hamper and the gas meter in a corner of the <i>back</i> hallway (not even the front one). Like dirty washing and the gas meter, obviously the telephone was seen as a necessary evil, and not one that you would be proud for your visitors to see. Its promotion to the front room shows spectacular social mobility in the upwards direction.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">How did Benjamin’s family react to the telephone’s ringing? Well, he recalls the curses and threats his father directed towards operators. If the British press is anything to go by, then complaints against telephone companies and their employees seem to be a European norm and nothing new in the early days of telephony. Benjamin’s school friends would also ring him at midday and wake up his parents from their siesta. This did not go down very well with the parents but Benjamin himself questions how this new technology was changing cultural practices.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The ringing of the bell increased “the terrors of the Berlin household.” The young Benjamin needed great effort to master all his emotions, fumble his way down the dark passage, and “quell the uproar.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is rare to read someone’s first impressions of a new technology, even rarer to find an account given with such articulation. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">p.s.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Browsing through <i>Berlin Childhood</i> I found another piece entitled “The Larder.” Expecting to read rhapsodies about home-made jams and hams hung up to dry, I was proven pleasantly wrong.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Benjamin describes how his sneaks into the pantry for a secret feast. His allusions to illicit rendezvous and sensuous experiences are deliciously naughty (no pun intended) but also just a little disturbing, if you remember that he is talking about <i>childhood</i> memories. Nevertheless, the images conjured up are delightful. Here’s a small taster (again, no pun intended) as the boy Walter silently enters the pantry: “my hand slipped through the crack of the barely opened cupboard as a lover slips through the night …”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Walter Benjamin. <i>Berlin Childhood Around 1900</i>. tr. Howard Eiland.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-2417148376160389022011-04-04T23:58:00.000+02:002011-04-04T23:58:21.040+02:00Brown's, the telegraph, and Kenya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</style> <![endif]--> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Still prattling about Brown’s hotel and its promotion of new communications technologies, the establishment also provided “news tape” for its distinguished guests.<span> </span>Presumably, important guests wanted to keep abreast of developments in commerce and government and such news would have been provided via telegraph, to ensure its currency.<span> </span>The hotel had its own telegraphic address (BROWNOTEL, LONDON); for this personalised address, they would have had to pay a fee to a telegraph company.<span> </span>They may indeed have had their own telegraph equipment on the premises.<span> </span>Another aside, telegraphs are, of course, obsolete today in western societies.<span> </span>The fax machine and now e-mail have hammered the final nail in the telegraph’s coffin.<span> </span>But you still find telegraphs in full use in other continents. <span> </span>Many of Kenya’s government ministries still quote their telegraphic addresses on official documents.<span> </span>I wouldn’t call this a digital divide as such; it’s more of another communications string to their bow.<span> </span>The telegraph can work with one wire and batteries at each end – handy to know in Africa when you can’t rely on a source of electricity for your computer 24/7.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">If you wanted to send a message and not pay a fortune then you needed<i> Low’s Pocket Cable Code</i>. Published in 1894, it was a cryptic text intended for travellers who wanted to send telegrams.<span> </span>It listed thousands of individual words and their associated meaning, thus enabling long messages to be sent economically.<span> </span>For example, “formerly” meant “Diphtheria of a severe form.”<span> </span><i>Low’</i>s gives another example using Brown’s Hotel: “Glorify Wednesday Brownotel” translates to “Engage two single-bedded rooms for Wednesday, Brown’s Hotel, London.”<span> </span>How did the word ‘glorify’ come to signify ‘book two single rooms’?<span> </span>Beats me.<span> </span>But it’s fun looking through this code book and seeing just what kind of messages people wanted to send.</span></div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-81634320838006975212011-04-04T23:40:00.000+02:002011-04-04T23:40:42.726+02:00Brown's hotel and Bell<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</style> <![endif]--> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I came across an advertisement for Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street, which appeared in an 1887 book about the London season.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’m always fascinated by old ads: not only is the language quaint and decidedly un-commercial, but they state things that today we would find self-evident.<span> </span>This ad mentions, for example, the availability of electric lights in all rooms, lifts and telephones.<span> </span>(Remember, this is 1887).<span> </span>Just to clarify, there was no extra charge for the electric light.<span> </span>As an aside, when ads cease to mention the unique selling point of telephones in bedrooms, then we can safely assume that telephones have become invisible and taken for granted.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Compare Brown’s with the Midland Grand Hotel (St. Pancras) which threw open its doors in 1873.<span> </span>Despite its luxurious fittings and decor, the building had no running hot water or plumbing.<span> </span>A battalion of maids had to run upstairs with buckets of hot water for the guests’ baths, and down again to empty chamber pots.<span> </span>If I were a hotel maid, I would much prefer to work at Brown’s.<span> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I have also read (unverifiable) accounts that Alexander Graham Bell stayed at the hotel on his first visit to Britain to demonstrate his new invention.<span> </span>It is also said that the first telephone call in Britain was made from the hotel by Bell.<span> </span>I shall take this with a fistful of salt until I can find a source.<span> </span>No end of famous personalities are connected with Brown’s and much is made of the Kipling connection (there is a suite dedicated to him).<span> </span>If, however, the historical connection with Bell is correct, then the hotel management seems a bit bashful about it.</span></div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-18148675125004638202011-04-02T23:02:00.002+02:002011-04-21T13:15:27.010+02:00Peter Fritzsche’s Berlin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">** A post dedicated to Berfrois, and to all students of Berlin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Peter <a href="http://www.history.illinois.edu/people/pfritzsc">Fritzsche</a> has published extensively on European history. Here I look at two of his books that focus on Berlin. They are not histories of the city <i>per se,</i> but rather depictions of the city as seen by its inhabitants. Inevitably the accounts are subjective: the protagonists select their tales and how they are presented, as does the author in retelling them. But then, isn’t all history like this?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Reading Berlin 1900</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fritzsche constructs Berlin as seen through its newspapers. The newspapers themselves produce the metropolis and at the same time, are products of the metropolis. Fritzsche examines how the image of the newspaper conveys the modern spirit of urban life. We see the coming into being of a new urbanised Berlin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fritzsche gives us a ‘grand narrative’ version of urban life but he tempers this with poignant vignettes that remind us there is a human face to historical accounts. Two instances stick in my mind. The first concerns an account of the murder of little Lucie Berlin (how appropriate her surname is!) who was killed in 1904 and her dismembered body dumped in the Spree river. (For the morbid amongst you, here's a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/49327328@N04/5554225176/">picture</a> of the spot where she was found.) The police investigation was the first one to use forensic science to prove that blood stains discovered were of human, and not animal, origin. My apartment building (constructed 1905) is of a similar type to Lucie’s. The apartments did not have bathrooms and residents shared toilets that were situated on the stair landing between floors. It was from such a toilet that Lucie was abducted. Lucie’s story was a perverse blessing for newspaper editors – stories like these helped circulation numbers tremendously.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fritzsche’s second portrait is of an old widow who sits in her window seat observing the comings and goings of people in the central courtyard of her apartment building. All the old apartment blocks have an interior courtyard, overlooked by windows from all the flats around the courtyard. (My exhibitionist neighbours opposite have no net curtains in their windows and I know that the girl is hard working and leaves the flat every day while it’s still dark, while her lay-about boyfriend takes his leisurely breakfast after 9.00 a.m. in his curtainless kitchen … but I digress.) Today’s courtyards are filled with rubbish bins and rusty bicycles. In 1900 children played there safely and women sat outside chatting.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is this blending of the public and private lives of Berlin that makes this account so readable. Fritzsche merely draws out a couple of threads and elaborates on these. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I found the author’s version of Berlin to be ‘unheimlich’: different but the same. There were the known landmarks, the streets that I traverse, the city trams I travel on, the way of life – all these are familiar yet at the same time strange, because they belong to a different age. An epoch that wasn’t too long ago but just far enough back to be unreachable.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Turbulent World of Franz Göll. An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century.</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I am struggling to find an explanation but when I read a description of Göll’s life, I immediately remembered the German film <i>The lives of others</i> (<i>Das Leben der Anderen</i>). Even though the film is set in 1980s East Berlin, both narratives share the same atmosphere and tone. Considering the timelines, the film could even pick up where Göll’s life finishes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps we should be wary of Göll’s account; was he writing for himself or for his putative readers? His self-awareness as an author undoubtedly would colour his writing. Regardless of our misgivings on the veracity of Göll’s account, we must still be glad that we have a first-hand account of historical events, even if this account has been mediated by Fritzsche.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Timewise, <i>Göll</i> continues after <i>Reading Berlin</i> but there is a sense of disjuncture. Perhaps this is my fault; maybe I’m trying to find a continuation or connection where none exists. Had Göll been born a couple of decades earlier, he would have had adult experience of the events in <i>Reading Berlin </i>and written about them. There is again a mix of the public and private: an ‘ordinary’ man’s take on big events. And it is ‘ordinary’ that is the key word in the book’s title. We have a clerk’s voice to add to that of the Establishment’s.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Unheimlich is also a term I would apply to Göll’s life (for the same reasons as <i>Reading Berlin</i>). He died relatively recently (1984) but witnessed events that most of us only read about in archives and history books. For heaven’s sake, why didn’t anyone interview this man for an oral history project??? People like him are a godsend for historians yet we let his journals languish in dusty archives.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some readers, more discerning than I, may take issue with the editorial decisions made by the author: which events from the diaries to select and how to present them. I think Fritzsche weaves the threads of Göll’s story seamlessly into his own narrative, providing as well all the necessary contextual information. Rather than an edited diary with footnotes, it’s best to view this new book as a history of twentieth-century Berlin and Germany which draws on first-hand accounts. Anyone who wants to read Göll’s unmediated version, however, is free to read his original journals at the <a href="http://www.landesarchiv-berlin.de/lab-neu/start.html">Landesarchiv</a> in Berlin. </span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the book reviews, I sense an undertone of slight derision about Göll’s writing activities. Is this because he is a ‘little man,’ insignificant, untalented, unqualified to express an opinion? Or is it sour grapes on the part of all the rest of us, because Göll was plucked out of obscurity and his story made public? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Both books amazingly capture the spirit of Berlin. Fritzsche shows how Berliners write their own city into being, and are still doing so! We meet characters who we dismiss as ordinary or nondescript. But there is no such thing as ‘ordinary.’ Every life has to be examined and has a story to tell. Just look at the stories our nondescript ‘little man’ has for us. I might keep a diary or write a blog (!) describing my prosaic life or mundane (to me) events in public life. Today such events are nonentities, non events but tomorrow, with the added patina of age, they will become historical accounts and readers will clamour to learn about times gone by.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fritzsche is spot on in seeing Berlin as ‘transitional.’ I also see the city as always being in a transitional phase, then and now. So much has happened in such a brief timespan (empire, world wars, cold war, democracy) and nothing seems to be settled yet. Scheffler’s verdict on Berlin’s fate seems to be validated: “Condemned always to become and never to be.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Postscript:</b> Here I really ought to confess my motivations for reading Fritzsche’s work. On a naïve, ostensible level I was looking for evidence of use of telecommunications in early twentieth century Germany. Realistically, I knew I wasn’t going to find much. What the books did provide, however, was an insight into urban living and Berliners’ transition into modern metropolitans. Fritzsche has filled out an image of the milieu in which I am working and illuminated the workings of contemporary minds.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-80095055114183223862011-03-26T19:45:00.001+01:002011-03-26T19:46:25.950+01:00On the Amish<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In my previous <a href="http://digital-telephone-book.blogspot.com/2011/03/amish-and-telephones.html">post</a> I posed the question: Why look at Amish communities when studying the social uses of the telephone? I think it is becoming clear that by comparing their society with ours, we can see that they have been asking the correct (in my opinion) questions of their relationship with technology. We, on the other hand, have asked the wrong kinds of questions. Sometimes, we don’t even bother to question the social aspects of technology; we just blithely accept everything with open arms and closed eyes. Only when the (negative) consequences of our actions strike us, do we throw up our arms and shout indignantly. But by then it is too late. What is done cannot be undone. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Amish are concerned about the unity, cohesion and harmony of their society, and the questions they ask themselves are very much focused on this objective. Any technology that does not foster close relations will not be easily accepted by them. The ‘English’, however, just want technology to help them do things faster, to do more things simultaneously, and if it helps them do it all cheaper than before, even better. Yes, we want our mobile phones in order to keep in touch with loved ones (but how did we manage before?). I haven’t heard anyone say, however, that he wants a telephone or other piece of technology in order to maintain social cohesion and a sense of community.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u>Are we yearning after a pre-lapsarian era</u>?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some celebs (and plebs, too) make a show of going cold turkey with their techno addictions: disconnecting from the Web, hiding their mobiles, logging off Twitter. Do they feel a genuine need to detox because of excess use, or is it mere curiosity? Ironically, they update the rest of us on their progress via blog posts (presumably a friend uploads the text for them). I sense that these individuals long for a utopia that does not exist. That which has been invented, cannot be un-invented. We can’t pretend we don’t know what life is like without Internet and iPhones. There comes a point when absolutely everyone is connected digitally/electronically and if you are the only one not connected, then you’re going to have a pretty miserable and lonely existence. This is the reverse situation of a hundred years ago when there really was no point in having a telephone subscription if you didn’t know anyone else with a telephone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At this point in history, not having a mobile phone is such an unusual event, it is worthy of an <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/my-life-without-a-cell-phone-an-amazing-tale-of-survival">article</a>. The arguments against ownership are convincing, but I still doubt many will follow the author’s lead. This ‘testing of the waters’ of a non-techno existence can give the individual a taste of the simple life but he would surely balk at going the whole hog and abandoning it all for an Amish lifestyle. In any event, once the blog posts have been written, these people revert to old habits and carry on as before. Mankind and his technologies have an extremely close relationship: only death or a power cut can separate them! Many rural families living in 1920s America had a telephone but no running water in their houses. During the Depression, not as many telephone connections were cancelled as you might have expected.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Despite the Amish’s wary adoption of telephones, this is one technology that, by its very nature, <i>does</i> erode community feeling. I would posit that <i>physical</i> proximity is one factor that determines the size and boundaries of any given community. (Which ancient Greek philosopher said that the city limits were where the leader’s voice could no longer be heard?) A telephone obviously makes a nonsense of these boundaries and erodes feelings of community with one’s physical neighbours. Let us not forget as well that the telephone is not <i>mass</i> media like, say, radio or television, which have the potential to unite a community. It is a point-to-point medium that involves only two individuals (if we discount for the moment conference calls).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Final part to follow in a few days.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-61512033332902091392011-03-24T23:09:00.001+01:002011-03-24T23:11:24.282+01:00The Amish and telephones<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Why look at Amish communities when studying the social uses of the telephone?</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">While hunting and gathering material for my thesis, I came across a few articles that questioned the relationship between Amish communities and modern technologies. At first glance one would say: ‘But the Amish don’t use modern technology (cars, phone, electricity), what’s there to study? Rather than stop at this facile conclusion, however, it’s revealing to look at the questions the Amish people ask themselves before adopting a new technology and also to understand how they do use technologies, once they decide on their utility to the community.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Observing Amish communities feels like you're watching someone in a living museum. Only these aren't museum employees but real people with all the usual attendant problems of survival. You couldn't describe them as living in a time warp, since there are some tenuous links to the outside world. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Unlike the ‘English’ (as the Amish call the non-Amish), these people are selective in which technologies they want to adopt. Each device or system is carefully weighed and the <i>consequences</i> of using that technology are taken into account. For example, by acquiring a mobile phone, an Amish farmer will understand that he can keep in touch with suppliers, customers, etc. without needing to visit them in person, but more significantly, he will also be aware that a telephone in his home will disrupt precious family time. (Have you ever tried to ignore a ringing telephone at home during a meal, or worse, during an argument?) It is these kinds of pros and cons that are considered. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Amish bishops pose the following question when deciding whether or not to adopt a technology: Will this device build a strong community and bring families together, or will it drive them apart? In the case of the telephone, they definitely view it as an intrusion to domestic cohesion and community spirit, a notion contrary to what the telephone promoters would have us believe.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A case of </span><i>déjà vu</i><span style="font-size: small;"> - the Amish are prepared to welcome the telephone for business use in their offices and workshops. But they will not easily tolerate a telephone in their homes. A familiar tale from the beginning of the 1900s when the telephone was first promoted as a <i>business </i>tool. There is a clear distinction between home and work and nothing should cause the two domains to overlap. If you bring a business tool (the telephone) into the home then this will spoil domestic peace and adversely affect family relationships.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There are many more aspects and observations on this topic, too much for one post. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Further notes will be posted in the coming days ...</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-49775065797568787082011-03-13T17:05:00.000+01:002011-03-13T17:05:25.553+01:00Jameson on Modernity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fredric Jameson's four maxims of Modernity (2002) -</span></span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We cannot not periodize.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">No 'theory' of modernity makes sense today unless it is able to come to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.</span></span></li>
</ol><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For me, it is significant that Jameson's Preface is subtitled "Regressions of the current age." He discusses a revival (or return, resuscitation, renewal, or whatever) of the concept of modernity, where postmodernity was a brief interlude, or, as I like to imagine it, a detour down a cul-de-sac which then necessitated an about-turn and a return to the main road.</span></span><br />
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</style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1026"/> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:shapelayout v:ext="edit"> <o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1"/> </o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Jameson, Fredric.<span> </span><i>A Singular Modernity.<span> </span>Essay on the Ontology of the Present</i>.<span> </span>London: Verso, 2002.</div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7075582801436597433.post-7062670042740158842011-03-08T23:27:00.020+01:002011-03-08T23:38:07.879+01:00Utopia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This evening Yoko Ono (@yokoono) issued the following tweet: </span></div><blockquote><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Total communication equals peace. And it will eliminate ignorance, apathy and hatred."</span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yoko is not the first to express such sentiments. Although it is a noble desire, it is one that must remain in the realm of utopia.</span><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Since the year dot, people have welcomed each new communications innovation with the same words and wishes - that the ease with which we can communicate with our fellow man will break down barriers, bring the peoples of the world closer together, and foster greater understanding and tolerance. </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">They said it when the telegraph went national</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">They said it when the Atlantic cable was laid</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">They said it when the telephone came along (and when the Paris-London link was established)</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">They said it (and are still saying it) about the World Wide Web</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So many new technologies and all have failed to bring world peace. Just about the only thing they have succeeded in doing is making it easier for generals to conduct wars.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</span></div></div>Elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00822197854763797106noreply@blogger.com0