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When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century
Abstract
This book describes how two newly invented communications technologies - the telephone and the electric light - were publicly envisioned, in specialized engineering trade journals as well as in more popular media, at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the focus is on the telephone, particularly how it disrupted established social relations (people did not know how to to respond to its use or impact) and how society tried to bring it under a carefully prescribed pattern of proper usage. While the emphasis is on the way professionals in the electronics field tried to control the new media, their broader social impact is also discussed.
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Citations
Cited by
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Panacea or Panopticon?: The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication
SPEARS, R., & LEA, M. (1994) · Communication Research · doi:10.1177/009365094021004001 · Cited by 705
The formation of group norms in computer-mediated communication
Postmes, T., Spears, R., & Lea, M. (2000) · Human Communication Research · doi:10.1093/hcr/26.3.341 · Cited by 557
Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball
Humphreys, L. (2007) · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication · doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00399.x · Cited by 318
Imagining the thinking machine: Technological myths and the rise of artificial intelligence
Natale, S., & Ballatore, A. (2020) · Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · doi:10.1177/1354856517715164 · Cited by 264
Metadata
- Authors
- Millard, A., & Marvin, C.
- Venue
- The American Historical Review
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1989-06
- Volume
- 94
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 714
- ISSN
- 0002-8762 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2056162744
- Cited by
- 848
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 10.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Millard, A., & Marvin, C. (1989). When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. The American Historical Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1873772
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
