Just a copper wire

New York, 1888

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDER A TELEPHONE POLE

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
     tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
     me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the
     shine drying,
               A copper wire.

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.

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.

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.
 

"Has the telephone killed the old-fashioned love letter?"

Apparently, yes.  The 1915 American trade magazine Telephone Facts 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.  

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Utopia

This evening Yoko Ono (@yokoono) issued the following tweet:

"Total communication equals peace. And it will eliminate ignorance, apathy and hatred."

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.

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. 

They said it when the telegraph went national

They said it when the Atlantic cable was laid

They said it when the telephone came along (and when the Paris-London link was established)

They said it (and are still saying it) about the World Wide Web

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.

Marketing ICTs - the hard sell

A lady came knocking on my door this afternoon.  She was a sales representative for Deutsche Telekom and was bravely trying to recover customers that had gone for rival companies (Alice, Vodafone, O2 and suchlike).  She politely enquired how much my monthly phone bill was and when I told her, she had to admit that, yes, I did have a point in defecting from the mighty DT.

In reality, I rarely use my landline phone to make calls.  It's infinitely cheaper for family members to communicate with mobiles (and cards, not contracts); even more so when we all belong to the same company.  As for long distance and overseas calls, there is, thankfully, Skype.  Who in his right mind would use a landline today to telephone abroad?  Not surprisingly, international Skype calls were three times as many as landline calls in 2010.  Besides that, there are so many mobile companies offering landline connections with internet, mobile telephony, television, etc. that it really is a buyer's market and it pays to shop around.  Virtually everyone nowadays has a telephone of one sort or another, which means the companies are chasing after smaller and smaller pieces of a diminishing pie.  So the nice lady from Telekom with her heavy bag of leaflets and tariffs was sadly wasting her time with me.


This set me thinking about how companies at the turn of the century went about attracting new customers.  They didn't have the benefit of huge billboards, television or radio commercials to spread the word to a wide audience.  I'm not sure how early the first ads would have been placed in newspapers, journals and magazines - some of the people who read and could afford these publications may have been able to afford a telephone connection too.  But would they have found a need for a connection that justified the cost?

Companies that offered telephone services in the first decades weren't really sure what people could actually do with a telephone.  The obvious answer (one-to-one communication or 'mere' chatting) wasn't as obvious to the late Victorians as it is to us.  Hence, we are amused by the quaint reports of concerts broadcast over the telephone, or church services, or distribution of news and information.  I think the mistake here is that they conceived of the telephone network as something for public, i.e. mass, benefit rather than a private medium.  What happened to make them realise they were going in the wrong direction?  What made people think the telephone was a suitable medium for public entertainment and dissemination of news?  How did the telephone companies, and later the General Post Office, come to 'discover sociability' (in the words of Claude Fischer)?  


It will be interesting to find out how the GPO sold new connections and if, indeed, they had a tangible marketing campaign to attract new subscribers.

• which type of customer did they have in mind (gender, social class, occupation, type of residence, location)?
• which reasons would they cite to a potential customer for needing a telephone?
• what benefits could the GPO, as a company, offer the customer?
• how did the GPO position itself against its competitors (telegraph, post, messengers)?

I predict a prodigious amount of research ahead of me!

Act of Communication

Who
Says What
In What Channel
To Whom
With What Effect?

Description of an act of communication by Harold D. Lasswell (1948)