Inventing American Telecommunications
Peoples & Things
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Is the Telephone a Consumer Facing Technology?
When we think of the phone, we think of this consumer facing technology that's in households. But like where are people using these things? You know, where are they getting access to them? This is important because the eminent sociologist Claude Fisher made the claim that the telephone was popularized by kind of the housewives of California who gossiped. And my claim, no, in fact, the gossips in the telephone network in the 1890s were the office boys talking about baseball and prize fights.
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