Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life

Perhaps no other technology has done so much to so many, but been studied by so few, as the telephone. Even as its physical size diminishes, the telephone is becoming more important. Today the phone is omnipresent at airports, in cabs, cars, & sidewalks. It chirrups even at theater & funeral. The once prosaic telephone is now a fountainhead of myriad benefits for denizens of the information age. It can also become a source of intrusion & misery as the home's sanctity is pierced by telemarketing & harassing calls at the most inconvenient times. Connections presents a series of pathbreaking studies, which give greater visibility to this important element in modern life. He examines how the telephone reveals gender relations in a way not predicted by feminist theories, how it can be used to protect & invade personal privacy, & how people harness telephone answering machines to their advantage. The authors inquiry reports on obscene phone calls, the abuses of caller-ID technology, & attitudes toward voice mail. National data about cellular telephones is presented to show the extent beepers & car phones have become status symbols. The author ranges from microsocial interaction to macrosocial theory & from the family & personal levels of organization to that of large-scale industrial bureaucracies. Of particular concern are issues of privacy & solitude versus publicity & free expression, as well as of security & choice of contract versus the ever more powerful computer technologies that allow our lives to be examined in the most minute detail, & make us vulnerable to anyone's intrusion, anytime, anywhere. The result of this multidisciplinary investigation is a compelling mosaic spanning sociology & psychology, & organization & communication studies. These arresting portraits will offer profound insight to historians, students of American culture, & those concerned about the nature & direction of the emerging information society.