[SIGCIS-Members] New Perspectives on Telephone Network Switching

[Sebastian Gießmann]

Hello SIGCIS,

this is happening today at 1200 EST, over at SHOT's Mercurians. If you 
would like to join us, you are very much welcome!

Join Zoom Meeting
https://ieee.zoom.us/j/93593784254?pwd=SkdHSHZIMVpIK2hYTDJOc2Rnc2hXdz09

Meeting ID: 935 9378 4254
Passcode: 599082

All the best,
Sebastian Giessmann (with Mara Mills and Alexander B. Magoun)

___________________

*New Perspectives on Telephone Network Switching*
Brown Bag Tag Team Talk, 10 March 2022

Following the successful initiation of our informal, “brown bag,” 
scholarly Zoom talks last year, we are continuing with a unique “tag 
team” format for our first presentation in 2022. On *Thursday, 10 March, 
at 1200 EST*, Sebastian Giessmann and Mara Mills will share the fruits 
of their recent archival research to offer new perspectives on a century 
of telephone network switching. Bring your lunch, breakfast, or dinner 
to the virtual table, and please share the meeting link obtained from 
info at mercurians.org–privately, please–with colleagues interested in 
telephony or networks, information or media studies, business or labor 
history, or cyborgs.

Sebastian Giessmann, University of Siegen, “The Strowger Gambit: On How 
(Not) to Automate Telephone Switching”

The talk reconstructs the back and forth between early manual and 
automated telephone switching in the last third of the 19th century. It 
is part of my ongoing research on cultural techniques of networking. 
Basically, the narrative will focus on two U.S. cases while keeping 
European developments in mind. The first one concerns the manual New 
Haven Telephone Exchange of George W. Coy (1878), which I reconstruct by 
way of the Southern New England Telephone Company records. A second case 
in point are the numerous patents and models that proposed automating 
telephone exchanges, including Almon B. Strowger’s electromechanical 
apparatus for La Porte, Indiana (1891/92). In both cases, the gendered 
work of technical mediation–its skills and practices–is decisive. But 
the translation of manual techniques of the body into infrastructural 
automation took a twisted and uneasy path. If we follow it closely, we 
learn about the relations of addressing and networking, and also about 
telephony’s transformation into digital mediations.

Mara Mills, New York University, “Overload: Switchboard Automation and 
the Disability History of 0s and 1s”

This talk considers the early history of digital labor and automation 
through a focus on the telephone switchboard, to which Claude Shannon 
famously applied Boolean algebra for streamlining in 1938. Labor 
historians suggest that operator management issues as much as technical 
innovation drove switchboard automation after 1913, when the Bell 
Telephone System consolidated its power as a legally sanctioned 
monopoly. Thinking alongside Frantz Fanon’s mid-century insights about 
telephone operators, surveillance capitalism, and overwork, in this talk 
I highlight another 1913 shift—workers’ compensation for “disability” in 
New York and in the Bell System—as an overlooked cost and management 
factor in early automation.

Based on my research in the telephone exchange collections at the San 
Antonio branch of the AT&T archives, and building on the work of Venus 
Green and Kenneth Lipartito, I suggest that it wasn’t simply increasing 
salaries and numbers of operators that worried managers. Switchboards 
were also automated because telephone engineers and telephone exchange 
managers could not, in the end, standardize operators’ bodies and 
behavior—or rather, they could not standardize them without causing 
injury, compensation expenses, and time off of work. After the passage 
of workers’ compensation laws, as Sarah F. Rose has argued, managers 
attempted to screen disability out of the workplace, through physical 
examination of applicants, but these attempts were undermined by other 
elements of the efficiency paradigm: workload increases, speed-up, and 
the repetitive strain compelled by machine interaction. A related 
expense was the cost of the new and compulsory health program, which 
included pre-employment screenings on a nationwide scale, the hiring of 
medical staff and the establishment of medical departments in large 
exchanges across the country, improved sanitation, elaborate safety and 
training protocols, and payment for sick days, as well as payment of 
compensation for workplace accidents.

We welcome your news! Please email info at mercurians.org and include your 
name and organization, if you are affiliated with one.

https://mercurians.org/news-and-announcements/

-- 
AR Dr. Sebastian Gießmann
https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/medienwissenschaft/personal/lehrende/giessmann_sebastian

Sprechstunde DI 17 Uhr:https://u-si.de/PDqYj
Raum AH-124 | Zoom | +49 271 740-2586

http://www.sebastiangiessmann.de
https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de
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