Towards a telephonic history of technology

Abstract

This special issue aims to start a new phase in the historiography of the telephone. This medium has been approached narrowly both by scholars in media studies and technology and, when studied, mainly with a national, mono-medial, and mono-usage perspective. Significantly, histories of the telephone have been narrated as a series of national histories and so many transnational, regional or local histories were not considered. Although telephone networks were mainly controlled and regulated at the national level, transnational exchange always existed, for example through the activities of engineers’ networks, multinational firms, and international organizations. As well, while global history approaches have been applied to the history of the telegraph, for the telephone a similar debate is still missing. Geopolitically, telephone research has remained limited to Europe and North America. There is a scarcity of works dealing with Asian, African or Latin American experiences and a small number of studies on multinational companies and international experts’ networks. Secondly, the majority of telephone histories have focused on the telephone per se, without considering other media or technologies which were affected by and have affected the development of the telephone. There are of course exceptions; the work of Jon Agar on the history of the mobile telephone remains one of the best books on this subject, where the development of the mobile is located in a broader perspective in which the landline telephone, broadcasting and even rising digital media like the computer are included. Similarly, the telephone has been often seen as a tool to communicate at a distance from one point to another (a one-to-one medium) and this mono-usage perspective has obscured other, alternative histories of the telephone (this is what we call a mono-medial perspective). Indeed, the telephone has been also used as a one-to-many form of communication and, with the so called ‘circular telephone’, listeners could access information, entertainment and different genres via the telephone even before the spread of radio broadcasting. As well, histories of technologies-in-use have shown that social networks, tinkering, resistance and imagination changed both technologies and the character of social life. For example, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan introduced a focus on consumers’ perspectives and preferences. According to Cowan, consumers’ decision-making on technologies is embedded in a network of social relations, which she termed the ‘consumption junction’. In fact, this special issue demonstrates how numerous actors decided for or