“Fass dich kurz!”

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.

Let me elaborate by drawing a comparison.

Then

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now

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. 

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. 

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.

The comparison

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.

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.

I’ll finish off with a salutary lesson for ardent telephone users.  Last month Amtrak officials threw a woman off a night train after passengers complained that she had been speaking loudly on her phone, for 15 hours.  I’m left wondering – what on earth did this woman find to talk about for 15 hours?

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 Social Shaping of Technology

MacKenzie, Wajcman 
The Social Shaping of Technology (1985)

Social scientists look at technology's effect or impact [my pet-hate word!] on society. 
Prior to this, we have to ask: What is shaping technology for it to have these effects?
What causes the changes in technology?
[i.e. a change in perspective from technological determinism to social determinism]

Questions the authors examine:
Which social factors shape technological change?
Does the type of our society affect the type of technology we produce?

If you accept technological change as an independent given,  then you see our social responses to that technology as passive; but,
If you concentrate on the effects of society on technology, then technology is no longer independent/autonomous.

From a SST perspective, technology is just another facet of our social life, just like our political or economic system.

Warning - just because technology can be shaped socially, it does not mean that it is easy to change technology


Technological Determinism
Technology is autonomous, independent, outside of society;
Changes in technology cause changes in society
It is problematic to ascribe agency to inanimate objects or systems - how can they cause society to be this or that?
Some technologies are resisted or rejected - which technologies are eventually adopted depends on the characteristics of the society.  Technology then is not so autonomous after all.


Contradiction to technological determinism - the same technology can have different effects in different societies.  When explaining social change, we must look to other factors in addition to technology.

Technology - consumption - culture

Telephone (as one example of a communications technology) is an artefact.

Artefacts can be used to construct our identity.

Telephone is ambivalent, double-sided since it

1. isolates us [we communicate without needing to be physically present]
2. connects us [we communicate with others where it would be impossible for us to be physically present]

Technology is no longer associated with the idea of human progress (first promoted during the Enlightenment).  Technology has not been the panacea we imagined it to be (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, global warming, pollution, etc.)

The effects that a tech has are not built into it; the effects of a tech are determined by how it is consumed and consumption needs a context.

The home as a context for consumption of tech

* The home has gone from being a unit of production to a unit of consumption (unless you are a woman, in which case it is both).

* More leisure time is spent at home.

* Home has become self-sufficient, self-contained - a process of privatization has occurred

* More emphasis on consumption, less on public sphere/community

* Again, the ambivalence of techs that bring us closer together but also isolate us from each other.

Definition of "technology"

Techs are made up of three components:

1. Physical artefact
2. Surrounding human activity - necessary, otherwise artefact on its own is useless
3. Human knowledge (know-how) - applied to the design, maintenance, etc.

In other words, tech is a social phenomenon.

Technology can be:

1. a physical artefact; or
2. a technique, a way of doing something (with or without artefacts)

Technological Determinism

The prevailing technology determines our culture, e.g. steam to power factories during steam age determines dominant form of social organisation (cotton mills, urban slums, etc.)

This theory believes that tech develops outside of society with a life of its own, and then have an impact on society [as if society were a passive recipient].

Although tech. determinism as a theory has its flaws and is now overlooked by academics, it still has a persistent hold over us.  We still talk as if we were powerless beings at the mercy of our machines, e.g. how the Internet is affecting our children, how mobile phones change the way we communicate, etc.  Note how the technology has become the subject of the sentence and we are the objects upon which the verb is acted out.

Question - why do we insist on talking about technologies that do things to us, or affect us in a certain way?   Why do we not talk about the things we do with technologies or how we use them?  Why do we put ourselves in the position of passive receptor or 'victim' of technology?  Is it because we want to absolve ourselves of all responsibility for when things go wrong, or when negative side-effects appear?  If there is a problem with a company delivery, then we are told the computer is down or such like.  You never hear the excuse 'sorry, the computer programmer didn't foresee this problem and thus programmed the computer incompetently.'

Social Shaping of Technology

This theory concentrates on

• Actors (engineers, managers, scientists, consumers); and
• Networks in which the actors operate

Techs embody the culture that produced them.  Culture shapes technology.

BUT techs do have their limitations - they limit what is possible; design of a tech is limited by the nature of the materials used.

Technology as text

Like any other text, technology can be

• encoded - physically (in its design) and symbolically (styling, marketing)
• decoded - read by customers

Note that production and consumption of technologies must be considered together and symmetrically.

Preferred readings are encoded in technologies during their design (adverts, news stories, etc.)  A 'reader' is directed towards this particular reading but there are of course alternative readings.  Decoding is also shaped by the reader's own cultural framework and the reading thus generated may be at odds with the preferred reading envisioned by the technology's creators.  There is some degree of resistance and transformation on the part of the reader but we should not read too much into the power of this resistance (apologies for the pun!)

Aberrant or oppositional decodings

There are occasions for alternative uses for technologies, uses unimagined or unplanned by its producers (e.g. fax machine used by students to contact outsiders during Tiannamen Square incident).

New techs are cumulative

New techs have to fit into the context of existing techs.

The telephone

First uses of the telephone - broadcasting of: church services; concerts; political rallies, sporting events; news.  Telephone was thought appropriate only for businesses and household management.  Telephone companies took a long time to realise that encouraging subscribers to gossip would be good for profits. [see also Fischer, Touch Someone, 56]

Meanings of technology change

As a technology becomes more commonplace among the population, its meaning shifts.  This symbolic meaning is also shaped by culture.  Example - mobile phone in the beginning was only for elite businessmen, a marker of success.  Now it's used by everybody (school kids, plumbers, etc.)  It has lost its exclusivity.  To be marked out as an 'elite' mobile owner, you now have to be inaccessible.  

Hugh Mackay, ed. Consumption and Everyday Life.  London: Sage, 1997.