This is all well and good, but what happened to federal?
In America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Claude S. Fischer studies the invention and propagation of the telephone in the United States by looking mostly at sociological factors to defeat the argument for technological determinism. Throughout the first half of his book, he discusses ways in which the usage of the telephone became prevalent throughout the country through the development and fine-tuning of telephony technology, and the use of marketing by large firms such as AT&T to convince consumers of the need for the telephone for both the attainment of higher status in society and help in emergency situations.
To show the significance of the public’s usage of the telephone in its ‘diffusion’ throughout society, Fischer describes the rise and the subsequent fall of telephone use in rural America from the 1900s to the 1930s. He attempts to show that this decline was created by the changes in the lifestyle of farmers around 1920, as a result of improved roads, greater use of automobiles, and the development of the radio, combined with decreasing competition in the telephone industry. Fischer’s method of analysis is unique, and he is correct in undertaking it to show the importance of social factors in the development of technology. At the same time, he fails to sufficiently combine his findings with other, possibly important economic and political issues relating to the build-out of telephone service to rural areas, and leaves some questions to linger in the reader’s mind.
Fischer argues that because the telephone industry focused on the development of telephone in urban areas and neglected to address build-out to rural regions of the country by the late 1800s, “[r]ural Americans largely discovered, demanded, and developed telephone service for themselves” (107) through the creation of small, locally-based telephone companies. After 1900, seeing the demand by the farming community, Bell and, even more significantly, large independent telephone companies “realized that farm customers were ‘essential’ to selling in the larger exchanges” (95), and the challenge of competition propelled them to increase their business in rural America. Even so, Bell and the independents did not pursue the development of telephony in rural areas to a significant degree because of the lack of profit resulting from build-out over large distances for much fewer subscribers than in urban regions. Fischer here seems to explain larger companies’ diminished interest in farming communities around 1920 by showing their lack of success in making a profit from their investments in rural regions, signified by their claim that “farmers did not really want or even need telephone service” (97).
However, Fischer believes this decline in build-out is not the whole explanation for the fall of rural telephony around 1920. In fact, he seems to place greater importance on the development of rural roads and radio technology around this time, and argues that farmers no longer had such a great need for telephone service when they could drive and use radios to communicate over greater distances.
This argument fails to prove as important as he makes it appear for two reasons:
1) It seems unlikely that any population, once introduced to a new form of communication technology, especially if that population developed the infrastructure and service of that technology for itself, would decide in a matter of one or two decades that it no longer requires the use of that technology. As Fischer himself argues, the telephone brought about groundbreaking changes in the way people could communicate with each other over larger distances, and it seems unlikely that driving (which is much slower) and the use of radio (which is not a two-way form of communication – at least not for farmers, as Fischer does not attempt to argue that farmers were proficient in the use of radio transmitters to any significant degree) would supplant the usefulness of the telephone, especially in rural communities where face-to-face communication even with one’s neighbor is usually not as simple as in urban areas.
2) As Fischer argues in other portions of his book, the federal government passed the Willis-Graham Act of 1921, allowing for a virtual monopoly by Bell, claiming that “telephony was a ‘natural monopoly’” and that “telephone competition ‘was an endless annoyance’” (50-1). The time period of the passage of this bill seems, coincidentally, to correlate closely with the industry’s sudden diminished interest in rural America. It is a likely possibility that rural areas stopped receiving telephone service because of lack of competition due to the federal government’s blessing of Bell’s monopoly. Indeed, as Susan Douglas’ book Inventing American Broadcasting also shows, federal intervention and regulation has had significantly adverse effects throughout history on the development of communication technologies and the advancement of diversity and democratic access. Fischer’s refusal to sufficiently explore this situation in his discussion about the decline of rural telephony, at any rate, is a major flaw in his argument.
Fischer's book provides an important insight into the social aspects of the development of communication technology, and proves that technological determinist arguments and those relying wholly on political-economic circumstances do not provide sufficient explanation for the creation and diffusion of technology. However, Fischer ends up going too far into the sociological, and his doing so leaves many questions unanswered.