Plus Que Ça Change

Abstract

In an article entitled "Palming the Planet", Ron Jasper, a marketing executive, is quoted describing his car trip from Seattle to Vancouver: "'The whole way up,' he says with glee ... 'I had my laptop [wirelessly connected to the office]. I was reading my e-mail. At the same time I checked my stock on this' -- he waves a new smart phone, sleek and easily palmed. 'At one point, I was talking on the phone, checking my stock on the laptop and steering with my knee'", he confided, "slightly embarrassed" by his admission. He concludes with the observation: "'These devices are making it possible for everyone to work in ways they never imagined before'". Leaving aside the obvious concerns over highway safety, I want to register the observation that Jasper's enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by his new phone and his elation over his ability to get more work done faster, are not in fact 'never-imagined' ways of working. Visions of efficiency and connectivity have been integral to the representations of communication technologies, especially the telephone, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Looking back on the images and descriptions of the telephone in the early 1900s reveals a similar fascination with the ability to transcend the mundane realities of time and space. The idea that 'faster is better' is not one born of our times, it is one that emerged and evolved out of the preoccupations of an earlier era. The contemporary obsession with faster connections and multiple function technologies is an amplification of a century-old preoccupation with speed and efficiency; just as the passion for "multi-tasking" is today's version of what a 1909 AT&T advertisement referred to as "the multiplication of power". The recurrence of similar utopic and dystopic themes seems to suggest that our hopes and fears about the possibilities of telephonic communication are regenerated with each technological advance. In this paper I explore some of the concepts which inform these representations and suggest that they function simultaneously as a critique and a celebration of the renewal of capitalism that seems to accompany technological progress. Capitalist Reveries In a speech to the New York Electric Club in 1889, Erastus Wiman, president of the Canadian telegraph system remarked: "if to accomplish things quickly, close transactions promptly, and generally to get through with things is a step toward a business man's millennium, then we must be nearing that heavenly expectation". He praises electricity, the telegraph, and the "most marvelous" telephone for making the businessman "almost divine in what he can achieve". Throughout the twentieth century, technology and technological developments have been embraced because they provided the means to radically improve speed, efficiency, and connectivity. As Wiman makes clear though, these attributes were not, and are not now, neutral or arbitrary values. Their worth is located in their application to the flow of goods, information, and ultimately to the circulation of capital. They are valuable because they facilitate a renewal of capitalism itself: the tremendous expansion of both capital and markets occurring at the end of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is not unrelated to the technological developments of these eras. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes that "Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange -- of the means of communication and transport -- the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for it". Improvements in the speed and flexibility of communication 'renew' capitalism because they overcome the temporal disadvantages associated with distance and facilitate the expansion of markets in geographic space. Perhaps more than any other communication technology, the telephone has encouraged and anticipated capitalism's utopic fantasies. It is no coincidence that in early advertisements, its promoters referred to the telephone as the "annihilator of time and space". Whatever other benefits the telephone came to be seen as offering, its ability to instantaneously transfer information and credit was perceived and promoted as its most perfect attribute. Linking together buyers and sellers in cities all across the country, the telephone re-organised the 'playing field' of capitalism. By making distance an increasingly irrelevant factor in the transaction of business, the telephone rearranged space and distance "to fit the rather strict temporal requirements of the circulation of capital". Time and Money According to Marx, "economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself". Wiman's celebration of the telegraph and the telephone at the New York Electric Club in 1889 is not much different than Jasper's delight with his smart phone and laptop computer as he careens down the highway towards Vancouver. Simply understood, the ability to save time translates into a saving of money but the relationship between time and money is not a straightforward one. Time and money appear as commensurate albeit inverse values because of the effect of the velocity of circulation on the accumulation of capital. They had come to be linked with the rise of wage labour and the practice of paying workers by the hour and in this sense, "money appears as measure". When in the mid-1700s Benjamin Franklin proclaimed that "time is money", and went on to explain their enigmatic relationship, he was describing more than a simple ratio. He that can earn ten shillings in a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversions or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Franklin not only equates time spent working with money, but also proposes a conception of unproductive time as a negative cost, a tangible loss against potential profit. Following the logic of his formula, if misspent time is perceived as a deficit, time saved can be counted as a profit. This way of thinking counts all time as potentially profitable in an economic sense and confers a speculative value on time. Telephone advertising in the first decades of the twentieth century made explicit use of this formula and, in so doing, not only asserted the value of the instrument but also provided a way of imagining time in terms of its market value. The text of a 1909 advertisement reads: The mere item of time actually saved by those who use the telephone means an immense increase in the production of the nation's wealth every working day in the year ... just counting the time alone, over $3,000,000 a day is saved by the users of the telephone! Which means adding $3,000,000 a day to the nation's wealth. (Italics in original) Contemporary representations of the telephone continue to employ the idea that savings of transaction time can be accumulated and converted into working capital. In a 1990 article on mobile offices in the financial magazine Money, a Los Angeles attorney is quoted as saying that his cell phone and mobile fax machine have "added two hours to my day and 25% to my annual gross". A 1993 survey of cell phone users by Motorola reported its findings in similar terms. Those canvassed claimed that a cellular phone "added 0.92 hours to their productive working day [and] increased their own or their company's revenues by 19 percent". This kind of temporal accounting involves two basic conceptual manoeuvres which can only occur if time is 'emptied' of its social value or meaning, leaving it available to take on a new and purely economic significance. First, in order to calculate time in terms of both its actual and speculative monetary value, it must be conceived in abstract terms, the value of each minute standardised and conceived as a unit of measurement. Second, and following from the first, because now each minute of the day has the same relative monetary value, the entire 24-hour day, not just the traditional 8-hour workday, comes to be imagined as zone for commercial activity. Prior to the telephone, the partition of the day into work and family time was safeguarded by the physical separation of the business and the domestic spheres. Even the telegraph, because its use was largely restricted to the workplace, did little to challenge the partition between public and private domains. The telephone, as it became increasingly ubiquitous in both offices and homes, disturbed these boundaries and expropriated time previously reserved for rest, relaxation and social activities for all manner of commercial uses. AT&T's declaration in an ad entitled "The Always-on-Duty Telephone" (1910) that "the whole Bell System is on duty 1440 minutes a day" also must have stirred anxiety with its conclusion that "if any of these minutes are not used, their earning power is irrevocably lost". As the "1440 minute" day expanded the potential for profit, it also increased competition and established new expectations. Social Anxieties The logic of capital's never-ending drive to renew itself dictates that time saved by technology is perceived not as "free time" but as potential profit, which must be reinvested or lost. Booster though he was of modern communication technologies, Wiman could not help but observe: One would think that the ability ... to talk freely over the telephone would so facilitate business pursuits and close up transactions so quickly that it would beget leisure, rest and quiet, but such is not the case. The thirst for achievement is so great ... that the more we do, the more we seek to do. We are no more encouraged to use the extra two or .92 hours gained by the cellphone for play or relaxation than we were when the telephone first began to speed up the tempo of our lives. Anxieties about the social effects of communications technologies are not new although they rarely manifest themselves in business discourse. Today, as business and technology publications celebrate each new communications innovation, general interest and women's magazines are more often questioning the impact of cell phones, pagers, palm pilots, and portable computers on family life and mental health. It is somehow both ironic and appropriate that during both periods, concerns about the social effects of telephone -- a medium of disembodied communication -- should manifest as anxieties about its negative corporeal effects. In 1889, an account in the British Medical Journal reported a new medical condition called "aural overpressure", an affliction suffered by those who used the telephone for extended periods of the work day. The "constant strain of the auditory apparatus" by prolonged telephone use was said to be responsible for "nervous excitability, buzzing in the ear, giddiness, and neuralgic pains". The Electrical Review recounted cautionary tales of individuals driven mad by the telephone's "constant ringing". In 2000, we find Scientific American and Time investigating the possible links between cellphone use and brain tumors. Despite the consistently inconclusive findings of multiple scientific studies, the British government ruled that cellphones sold in the United Kingdom must carry health notices that warn "people to be careful about where and how long they use them", and American cellphone retailers have voluntarily begun to include "a one page health-and-safety bulletin" with all cellphones they sell. Warren Susman suggests that examining the anxieties associated with any given technology can provide useful insight into the cultural values at stake for its users. According to the scientific experts of their day, both "aural overpressure" and brain tumors are avoided by reducing the amount of time spent on the telephone, perhaps less time working and possibly more time in the pursuit of other more socially oriented activity. It is possible to look at these panics around physical and mental well-being as a reassertion of the social, of the body, a sort of return of the repressed, at those historical moments the alienating effects of capitalism are being exacerbated by the uses to which we put technology. If, as Marx writes, the "circulation of capital constantly ignites itself anew" then it seems logical that the discourses which circulate around the telephone and communications technologies will continue to renew themselves at key historical moments. Advances in telecommunications at the end of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have inspired similar desires and elicited comparable anxieties because they have been driven by a common motive: the search for the competitive advantage that drives both capital and technological development alike. References Adam, B. Time and Social Theory. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Harvey, D. The Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985. Marvin, C. When the Old Technologies Were New. Oxford UP, 1988. Marx, K. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Press, 1973. Susman, W. I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Janin Hadlaw. "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php>. Chicago style: Janin Hadlaw, "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Janin Hadlaw. (2000) Plus que ça change: the telephone and the history of the future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php> ([your date of access]).