Network nation: inventing American telecommunications

We argue that there exists a critical opportunity for independent communications policy research to make a difference and to anticipate and facilitate a paradigm shift in telecommunications regulation.

2021

N ote: is article is an abridged transcript of an interview with Richard R. John that was conducted for the Chinese Communications Studies Re view. e in terviewer was Gengxing Jin, an assistant professor of media and communications at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. Dr. John received the 2011 AEJMC History Di vision's award for the best book of the year for his Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommuni cations. He's also the author of Spreading the News: e American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995). He teaches in Columbia University's Ph.D. program in communications and is a member of the core faculty of Columbia's history department. He teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications. His research focuses on the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He received his Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University.

History and Technology

This essay contends that the US Signal Corps' wartime network had major consequences for the postwar development of the political economy of the telephone in the United States, France, and Europe. Our approach is transnational. In contrast to previous scholarship, which is mostly top-down, nation-centric, and preoccupied with the internal configuration of telephone networks that are typically studied inside the walls of discrete national containers, we widen the lens to explore a broad array of influences on network evolution, including those that originated from within individual operating companies and beyond national borders. Among the themes that we explore is transnational standard-setting. And among the agents of change that we emphasize is the influence of military conflict on personal networks, technical protocols, and international organizations. From such a vantage point, the First World War emerges as a constitutive moment in the making of the information infrastructure in the modern world.

This article asks if political economy played an identifiable role in shaping the revolution in telecommunications and computer networking. In the case of the United States, we offer three arguments about the impact of political economy and policy on the architecture of the ICT infrastructure. First, it tilted toward an architectural principle of “modularity” whose implementing policy norms influenced the paths of both the telecom equipment, computer equipment and software, and computer networking markets. Second, it created multiple network infrastructures for telecommunications when other countries either tried to retain a monopoly infrastructure or carefully limit the number of competitors. Third, it propelled both a particular architecture for computing (intelligence at the edge of the network) and the full realization of the potential benefits of the Internet. Thus it is not just how much competition that matters--it is the particular policy mix for competition that matters, and this policy mix reflects fundamentals of political economy.

Political Communication, 1993

We argue that there exists a critical opportunity for independent communications policy research to make a difference and to anticipate and facilitate a paradigm shift in telecommunications regulation.

Technology and Culture, 2023

Many historians, journalists, and media mavens have traced the genealogy of Victorian communications networks backward, beginning with radio after World War I and continuing with personal computing in the 1980s and ending with the internet today. This impulse has accelerated with the rise of electronic commerce, social media, and virtual reality. This essay proposes a different agenda. Drawing on recent historical writing on mythmaking, materiality, and political economy and illustrated with case studies from Europe, North America, Asia, and North Africa, it reenvisions the history of new media by telling the story of Victorian communications networks in relation to the issues of their day, not ours. The essay spans five networks in the period between 1830 and 1914: the landline telegraph, the undersea cable, the telephone, the wireless telegraph, and the mail.

Andreas Fickers, "Neither good, nor bad; nor neutral": The Historical Dispositif of Communication Technologies, in: Martin Schreiber / Clemens Zimmermann (eds.), Journalism and Technological Change. Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Trends (Frankfurt a.M. / New York: Campus, 2014), pp. 30-52. , 2014

In 1985, Melvin Kranzberg, then professor for history of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding editor of the journal Technology and Culture, delivered the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in which he explained what had already come to be known as Kranzberg’s Laws—“a series of truisms,” according to Kranzberg, “deriving from a longtime immersion in the study of the development of technology and its interactions with sociocultural change” (Kranzberg 1986, 544). The aim of this article is to reflect on Kranzberg’s first law, which basically says that technology is—in sociological terminology—an actor category. Conceptualizing technology as actor category means that to think about the agency of technology and technological artefacts and to reflect upon the social and cultural meaning of technology and what it does to those using it for specific purposes—for example for journalists producing television news, documentaries or radio features. As historian of technology and media, I’m especially interested in how technology is co-producing our perception of reality and how we can study and conceptualize the complex relationship between media technologies and mediated realities.

Enterprise & Society, 2018

The half-century following the Civil War witnessed an epochal transformation in American telecommunications. In the 1870s, the telegraph network became a spawning ground for a remarkable spate of inventions that included the phonograph and the telephone, and around 1900 the telephone network became the first electrical communications medium that network providers intended to be accessible to the entire population. This transformation was a centerpiece of the still unprecedented burst of inventive activity that economic historians call the Second Industrial Revolution. This essay builds on recent historical writing, as well as my own research, to sketch some of the ways in which this transformation was shaped not only by market trends and technological imperatives, but also by governmental institutions and civic ideals.

2002

We at a new step of software where the development of applications is done not using instructions, but composing applications. The software object oriented which allows the integration between applications is the solution for the designer to produce the own software. It is possible to use integrated applications with a limited knowledge of algorithms and programming languages. That allows the not specialized users to use specialized multimedia tools. The consequences of this opportunity can result very important not only for the designer but above all the actors involved in the decision making process. It is hard to evaluate the social weight of hypertexts and hypermedia in the field of social participation to the decision making. However their efficiency in the communication problem it is clear, we can preview that in the next future the use of hypermedia will be more extensive in the field of decision making, which involve public interests. Some hypertexts developed in the CAAD La...