Serving a Wired World

London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital Volume 17
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-0-520-34473-0
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 288 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 567 g

Reihe: Berkeley Series in British Studies

In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new—the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today’s communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today.

Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status—from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hindmarch-Watson, Katie

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Gewerkschaften, Industrielle Beziehungen
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftssektoren & Branchen Medien-, Informations und Kommunikationswirtschaft Telekommunikationswirtschaft, Post
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder England, UK, Irland: Regional & Stadtgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures
Acknowledgment

Introduction 
1 • Dispatches from Underground
2 • The Public Service of Discretion
3 • Gendering the Central Telegraph Office
4 • Bodied Telegraphy
5 • Unintended Networks
6 • Tapped Wires
7 • Martial Mercuries
8 • Voices on the Wires
Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Katie Hindmarch-Watson is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at Johns Hopkins University.