Abuse of the telephone, or cold calling

A reader of the Saturday Review wrote a letter to the editor in November 1937 complaining about the underhand techniques of pushy sales reps.  "Pater Filiarum" had earlier published an announcement of his daughter's engagement.  Weeks later he was bombarded with telephone calls from florists, photographers, hotels, and other businesses involved in the matrimonial 'industry', all fishing for business.  I myself have fallen prey to similar tactics.  So what's new?

He denigrates the callers for wasting his valuable time and disturbing his domestic peace.  He considers various solutions: 

• disconnect the telephone: "not practical";
• go ex-directory: "gives a lot of trouble to one's friends"

He hits on a novel solution in the end:

"What we do is to inform the interrupter that we have black list of all firms who employ this method of convassing, and that we do no business with firms on the black list."

Effective, don't you think?

The following week's edition prints a reply from "Sufferer" who conveniently commiserates with Pater Filiarum.  In his view, the culprit is the telephone book which lists both addresses and telephone numbers (!) making the job of the cold caller a lot easier.  Another bane of modern life is the efficient mail system which delivers "the never-ceasing flood of circulars [...] through the letter-box."  "Sufferer" has even heard of companies ringing up families when there's been a bereavement.

What doesn't fit
Both the writer and respondent remain anonymous.  Other letter writers on the same page supply name and address.  What did Pater and Sufferer have to fear?  Retribution from more cold callers? 


Is this letter something like a 'puff' - ostensibly a reader's letter but really a fix?  If so, what is the magazine trying to sell, what message is it trying to convey?  Perhaps an indirect way of advising affected readers on how to deal with unwanted callers?


Having said this, whether the letter is genuine or written by a journalist, its existence shows a concern for domestic privacy, aggressive (for the period) marketing techniques, and the utility of the telephone.


Why not write to the telephone company, complaining about the companies' misuse of technology?  Or publish (and be damned) this black list of offending companies?


1937 strikes me as a bit late to be complaining about sharp business practices.  By now I would have thought people would be used to them, even if the telephone is still not so widely diffused.


Saturday Review was a magazine with a long history but folded a year after these letters were published.  It had a controversial past (expressed anti-German sentiments), hosted distinguished contributors, had a colourful aristocratic owner (Lady Houston, who died one year before these letters appeared).  Do these elements colour one's interpretation of Pater/Sufferer's letters?


"Abuse of the Telephone."  Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art.  November 1937.

Society of Arts gets connected

The Journal of the Society of Arts reports to its members in 1881 that it now has a connection with the Telephone Exchange (Chancery Lane).  If a member is also a subscriber to the same exchange, then they too can speak directly with the Society.  Note that the article talks of members "whose place of business" is connected, and not their residence.  It was rare in the early days for a telephone to be fitted in someone's house, unless it was a direct line with the householder's business premises.

Another innovation: the Society has a private line connecting it to its printers in Fleet Street.  This would work more like a speaking tube/intercom with a different handset to the one members would ring up on.

Interestingly, the private telephone to the printer's replaces an older Wheatstone ABC telegraph, which used an existing Post Office line.  They merely changed the instruments at the ends of the line.


Journal of the Society of Arts.  11 February 1881.

Thrift, Part II

Continuing Thrift's point about the stubborn persistence of technological determinism in accounts, such accounts rarely placed these technologies within a framework of linked social practices (other connected technologies and humans).  Instead they would be looked at in isolation.

Accounts need to remember that technologies belong to a history of social practices.  As such, we cannot separate the technology from the practices.

Thrift, "New urban eras and old technological fears" - Part I

I am a fan of Thrift's writing, not only because of his analysis but also due to his fresh style of writing; he cuts through all the hype and myths and tells it as it really is.  A professor of geography would seem to be a strange academic to read when one is studying the history of technology and telecommunications, but Thrift has done important work on space/place/time.  This has a direct bearing on my thesis: people's perception of space and time gradually altered in the late nineteenth century, thanks to various developments in society and technology (more efficient public transport; greater awareness of time - pocket watches, factory shifts, official bureaucracy, train timetables; telephony).  The telephone, of course, was not the sole factor in changing notions of time and space, but it did play a role.  Generally, things were speeding up and everywhere around them, people saw spaces becoming smaller (i.e. distant places were not so distant any more) and the time needed to achieve something became shorter - but isn't that just as true for us today?

What follows are some extracted notes from Thrift's article.  There is no particular structure to the notes selected: they merely made a strong impression on me and they are notes that I find relevant to my thesis.


What is 'new'?
We all talk about new concepts, technologies, etc. but never really examine if these things are genuinely new, or just an evolution of something older.  'New' also means 'modernity' and the two are joined at the hip with communication technologies.
Relationship between man and machine
This ought to be re-evaluated - perhaps there shouldn't be a hierarchical relationship between the two, rather both should be on equal footing in actor networks (per Latour).
Modernity
Thrift advocates abandoning Modernity as a historical concept and looking instead at historical change as slow, disjointed [i.e. not linear and teleological].
History of telecoms is evolutionary
Today's digital culture is not 'new', despite all the geek rhetoric.  It is not something that appeared out of thin air with no connection to the past or its technology or artefacts.  Today's 'new' technologies are nothing more than digitalised versions of the old ones.

• Old and new technologies live together side by side; the old is not discarded when a new version comes along.
• Technologies are cumulative; they build on the success of their predecessors.

"space of information"
Writing about 'new' telecoms technologies uses a new dimension, that of the "space of information".  But discussions of this information space omit the social element.
Technological determinism
Discourse on technology originating in the nineteenth century was prone to technological determinism.  We might forgive them their sins as they didn't know as much as we know today (!) but we must not be smug - we still commit the same sin today, even if we don't acknowledge it.  [It has been a hard habit to kick and one that has become so ingrained that we don't even realise it.  How many times have we read or talked about how 'the Internet is changing the way we work and study?'  Or (my personal favourite) 'Television is ruining our children's intellect?'  Such determinist thinking is rife in all domains.  Haven't we learned anything from the past?]


Part II will follow shortly.


Square brackets indicate my own thoughts, not those of Thrift.

Nigel Thrift.  "New urban eras and old technological fears: reconfiguring the goodwill of electronic things."  Urban Studies 1996 33:  1463.

The telephone in England and America

J. Ellis Barker.  "The Telephone in England and America."  Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. 25 Nov 1922.

The word "backwardness" occurs frequently in Barker's 1922 article, and he is not referring to the situation in the US.  He reports on statistics issued by AT&T which show how many telephones there were in the world, and in which countries they were to be found.  In January 1921 there were 20.8 million phones worldwide - and 12.4 million of them were in the US.  The United Kingdom lags in thirteenth place with 2.1 million telephones.  These figures demonstrate the "extraordinary backwardness of the English telephone."  Even more shameful is the fact that the UK lies behind "poverty-stricken and backward Austria" in the league table.

The figures are more illuminating when we convert them into number of phones per one hundred population.  London had 4.7 telephones for every one hundred people; the US as a whole had 12.4; San Francisco 29.4 (they obviously talked more there!)  There were as many telephones in New York as there were in the whole of the UK.

I would normally be somewhat dubious of statistics produced by a commercial entity, but in this case other sources bear out these findings (regarding global distribution of telephones). 

The writer continues in laudatory terms about the American service: how efficient it is; how superior the standards are; how even poor people and farmers use the service.  

The British service, the writer informs, has been held back by bureaucracy and under development.

It is once more interesting that the writer sees the telephone as primarily an instrument for business (as opposed to domestic us), having proved itself to be "a business instrument of the utmost value."  Again, English business men "can realize the backwardness of the telephone" if they travel to the US and see how things are done there.

The article writer was German; how much this has to do with his disparaging language and affinity for the word "backward" I know not.  Was he perhaps sponsored by AT&T to write this article?

Technology/telephone and ...

..politics
Always a controversial area.  Obviously government intervention (or, interference?) held back developments in telephony, so as not to harm their investment in the telegraph.  Despite this, the former overtook the latter.  When was the turning point?  Surely, other factors also impinged on the telephone's development, such as people travelling more, migration to urban areas, increase in commerce?  Why was the Post Office so negative about the telephone?  Was the system so perfect (with errand boys, telegrams, and twelve postal deliveries daily) that a telephone was superfluous?  Did they really need to invent a need for it?

..class/gender
Another controversial area.  These categories are not immutable and fixed in concrete.  They change over time so we mustn't look at, say, gender roles in the Fin de Siècle and assume these are the same gender roles that we know in the year 2010.  What could be examined is how telecommunications technologies mediated class/gender relations of the time and whether use* of these technologies reinforced/weakened those relations.  For example, how did domestic practices change when a telephone appeared in the hallway?  Who answered it?  What was the involvement of servants?  A gentleman would never think of paying a "morning visit" to a single young woman (and certainly without her mother/chaperone being present).  But what was society's reaction later when he could telephone her from the comfort of his own home?


..culture
How is the telephone represented in visual art, dramas, novels?  How soon after its invention did the telephone start to appear in cultural artefacts?  How soon is it before we can talk about the existence of a "telephone culture"?


..work
The telephone in business and the workplace.  Again, slighted related to class/gender in the sense of workplace relationships in connection with the telephone [boss/employee].  Particularly interesting is the introduction of the telephone in the City.  An ultra conservative domain of the male, upper classes, the City did not welcome the telephone with open arms.  Their business dealings were based on personal contacts, networks, gentlemen's agreements and word of mouth (see Kynaston's magisterial The City of London).  That's how it had always been done and they saw no reason to change in a hurry.
Developments also occurred in general office work (more office automation - typewriters, construction of large office blocks in city centres, office work becoming more suitable for women - feminisation of office work).  Telecommunications in industry/commerce, however, is too big a topic; it deserves a dissertation all of its own.




* Here I nearly fell into the trap of saying "whether these technologies reinforced ..." as if they had free agency.  The discussion should revolve around "technologies-in-use" and what people do with them.