Katie Hindmarch-Watson. Serving a Wired World. London’s Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital.

Abstract

Serving a Wired World is a tightly focused study with broad implications for our understanding of the making of the modern information society. Its topic is the workforce recruited to manage London’s telegraph system after nationalization in 1870 and the early years of the telephone system, which came under full state control in 1911. The global dimension reflects London’s place as the center of not just the national communications network but the entire imperial network. Whereas the penny post was designed for mass usage, the pay-by-word telegraph and the expensive telephone contracts deliberately confined the new systems to an elite and largely male clientele. The ­nearest the telegraph came to a popular service was in the dissemination of racing and other sporting results. The technical innovations of the period embodied the liberal ambition of commercial, political, and cultural progress based on the frictionless flow of confidential information. At the same...