America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 Paperback - 1994

First line

In 1926 the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee proposed that its group meetings discuss the topic "Do modern inventions help or mar character and health?"

From the rear cover

"A model for historians and sociologists and . . . a standard to which all future research on technology will refer."--Daniel Bell, Harvard University

"Will be essential reading in the social history of the telephone for a long time to come."--Carolyn Marvin, author of When Old Technologies Were New

"Everybody uses the telephone; only Claude Fischer has thought about it. The telephone has liberated us from neighborhood boundaries. It lets us play and work together over long distances. Long before the computer, its communication potentials helped change our society. Claude Fischer documents the planned decisions--and the unplanned events--that made the telephone such an important instrument for connecting America."--Barry Wellman, University of Toronto

"Fischer confronts the most significant, but also the most difficult, question we can ask about a new technology--what differences did it make in the lives of its users?. . . Fischer alerts us to the complexities involved in the incorporation of a new technology into everyday life. The richness and sophistication of his analysis should caution us not to jump to easy conclusions about the effects of technological change."--Roland Marchand, UC Davis