Was the telephone a community building tool?
Once again, we're back to This
Day in History, for our date link, and it's a link with significance
both for technology and "information retrieval". We read that on February
21, 1878
The first telephone directories issued in the U.S. were
distributed to residents in New Haven, CT. It was easy to "Let Your Fingers Do the Walking" at that time as only
50 subscriber's names were listed.
I suppose that it's easy to view that event as lacking much earth shattering
significance, but the telephone directory has become a metaphor for the
organization of large quantities of information, so its beginnings deserve
mention. Perhaps worthy of note is the fact that the directory consisted
of a single page with the fifty names, and only the names. My source writes:
"no numbers were needed", though to my mind a comment of that sort raises
more questions than it answers. Why weren't numbers needed? Because each
call went through an operator? If so, no directory was needed. Because
you dialed someone's name? That's a nice idea which I doubt was actually
realized back then. To tell the truth, I don't know how people dialed phones
back then, or if they dialed at all.
The first telephone directory definitely seems to be a source of pride.
On a web page of the Southern New England Telecommunications Corporation
we read that:
SNET, the nation's 10th largest telephone company, is
strategically located in the center of the Northeast Corridor.
In 1878, SNET opened the world's first commercial telephone
exchange. The company published the first telephone directory and led the
industry in switching from operator to dial services.
But in keeping with the topic of this month's column, it seems proper to
ask whether the telephone brought people together or separated them. The
obvious, knee-jerk answer is that of course it brought them closer together,
but were the first fifty people in New Haven to have their names in the
directory brought closer to each other? Perhaps they were distanced from
the rest of the city's inhabitants. Did they find that though they were
in a position to speak comfortably with one another while at home, they
had nothing to say? Or that speaking to someone without seeing him or her
was an alienating experience?
And one more question: were people constantly asking how to integrate
the telephone into the educational experience?
Go to: Just browsing, thank you.