PSSSST...:

As telephones became ubiquitous in America--their number grew from 1.3 million in 1900 to 43 million at the end of the 1950s--they nearly disappeared from the realm of scholarly inquiry. Perhaps, as political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool noted in the introduction to a 1977 book, The Social Impact of the Telephone, "the telephone's inherently dual effects are one reason for the paucity of literature on its social impact. Its impacts are puzzling, evasive, and hard to pin down."

But so too are the impacts of, say, the computer. Witness the intense debate occasioned by the publication a couple of years ago of The Shallows, in which technology journalist Nicholas Carr examined whether the Internet was changing the way we think. Yet while there are entire academic journals (e.g., Computers in Human Behavior) that parse the social impact of computers, not a single scholarly publication is devoted to the telephone. Even the mobile phone, arguably, is more scrutinized for its computer-like texting functions than its influence on our vocal communication.

Indeed, it is striking how many phenomena attributed to the Internet age have their historical echo in the telephone. Identity theft and Internet predators? The early years of the telephone brought concerns over the unwanted entry--via telephone line--of unsavory characters into the home, and some people called for laws to regulate criminal use of the phone. Or consider the contemporary argument that automated high-frequency Internet trading increases the volatility of financial markets. As Aronson noted, "The widespread use of the telephone probably added to the short-run instability of such markets." Before unwanted spam e-mails there were unwanted sales calls. The phrase "information superhighway" was preceded by a century in an AT&T ad announcing "a highway of communication." Computer hacking grew out of the culture of "phone phreaks"--those early-1970s technological obsessives (Steve Jobs among them) who figured out how to manipulate the phone system to place free phone calls.The list of parallels goes on.

Perhaps the telephone, despite its seemingly transformative nature--the annihilation of time and space--didn't change us much after all. Fischer, in America Calling, refuting the technological determinists who see the telephone altering the way we think and behave, quoted historian George Daniels: "Habits seem to grow out of other habits far more directly than they do out of gadgets." Social historian Daniel Boorstin similarly observed that "the telephone was only a convenience, permitting Americans to do more casually and with less effort what they had already been doing before."

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