Panic and the Telephone
I have an op-ed in the New York Times discussing the lack of panic around the early telephone. This runs contrary to the sentiment you’ll find online, where people often defend current tech—AI lately—by pointing to a list of “panics” about earlier technologies, usually including the telephone.
Here’s an example of such panic that is often cited:
In 1926, members of the Catholic Knights of Columbus openly debated: “Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”
The reason this example is often used is that it appears on page 1 of a social history of the telephone, America Calling, by Claude Fischer.
Three things: 1) This is just a discussion prompt, and we don’t even know how people landed on this question during the actual discussion. 2) It’s just one example, and the fact that so many people keep using this one example, even though it’s not very good, is indicative of how little evidence for a panic is out there. If there were a panic, people would be tripping over examples in the archive. Imagine how easy it would be able to find smartphone “panic” examples without overlapping with those used by others. 3) The author who first dug up this example, Fischer, never suggests it is reflective of a panic. And this is typical: people claiming a panic source it from researchers who have dug much deeper and not made that claim. (For my own research, in addition to going through every phone headline in ProQuest up to mid-1909 at this point, I first searched every headline throughout the 19th and 20th centuries using keywords like "fear" and "danger," as well as every telephone mention in magazines like The Atlantic.)
The Knights of Columbus had two more questions that Fischer quotes, both about the car’s impact on society. It must have been an exciting find for Fischer because his book compares the impact of the phone and the car. In the process, he finds that there was much more alarm over the latter. To finish a quote I used in the NYT piece: “There was little serious controversy about the telephone, unlike the automobile, toward which many people were initially fundamentally hostile.”
Sometimes those claiming a panic have misread, but sometimes they’re victims of misreadings. For instance, some people claim there was a panic about women gossiping on the phone, but the evidence for that is shaky. A 1991 book relates the following:
Still, when women began to use the instrument for sociability, in order to break out of their isolation in the household, men started to object to this frivolous use of the telephone, and to ridicule them in newspapers by accusing them of having a "gossiping instinct."
Let’s look at the source of that “gossiping instinct” quote. It’s from a piece called “The Country Telephone” that ran in The Youth’s Companion on June 28, 1906, and begins, “The farmer’s wife has a new resource”:
To one who has never experienced the solitude of the farm it is hard to realize the joy of the wife and mother at being able to consult a friend about the cut of the baby's coat, the recipe for mince pies, or the dose of cough sirup. . . . "Old Mis' Bearce says she'd rather go without her victuals than have the telephone taken out!" What a testimony to the desire for human companionship! The gossiping instinct, some cynical critic will say. But, after all, what is that but the wish to compare notes on the perennially interesting study of human nature—a study as fascinating to the unknown countrywoman as to the famous psychologist?"
Does this sound like an accusation? Does it sound negative about women using the phone at all? It’s a flagrant misreading. And it also runs contrary to the spirit of most discussions of farmwives’ usage of the phone. In story after story, the phone is celebrated for giving them some relief from loneliness at home while the rest of the family is out on the farm. Here, the writer is saying he knows women are sometimes accused of gossip, but who isn’t fascinated by the lives of others? It’s pro-woman and very pro-phone.
Most complaints about gossip were not about defending society from the phone but defending the phone from society. That is, early on, some thought the phone should only be for business. Chitchat was meant to be kept brief so as to keep lines free (especially when they were party lines). Women got some mockery for talking on the phones, but this was a problem perceived more by phone companies than the larger society.
It’s tempting to call such clear misreadings a game of telephone, but it’s more people hearing what they want to hear. The same is true with how people approach evidence of a telephone panic.
Another example of panic often cited is the people afraid to touch their phones. This reminds me of discourse today about how the world is so safe (e.g., with regard to diseases prevented by vaccines) that we no longer appreciate that there was ever danger. Thanks to safety regulations, one can pick up a phone or walk under a high voltage wire without fear. But the world was not like that in 1889. There were regular stories of people being electrocuted by high voltage lines crossing with phone lines, or by lightning passing through the telephone line. We're so safe now that we ignorantly mock those in the past who had reasonable fears.