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<p>Hello SIGCIS,</p>
<p>this is happening today at 1200 EST, over at SHOT's Mercurians.
If you would like to join us, you are very much welcome!<br>
</p>
<p>Join Zoom Meeting<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ieee.zoom.us/j/93593784254?pwd=SkdHSHZIMVpIK2hYTDJOc2Rnc2hXdz09">https://ieee.zoom.us/j/93593784254?pwd=SkdHSHZIMVpIK2hYTDJOc2Rnc2hXdz09</a><br>
<br>
Meeting ID: 935 9378 4254<br>
Passcode: 599082</p>
<p>All the best,<br>
Sebastian Giessmann (with Mara Mills and Alexander B. Magoun)<br>
</p>
<p>___________________<br>
</p>
<p><b>New Perspectives on Telephone Network Switching</b><br>
Brown Bag Tag Team Talk, 10 March 2022<br>
<br>
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 <b>Thursday,
10 March, at 1200 EST</b>, 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
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:info@mercurians.org">info@mercurians.org</a>–privately, please–with colleagues interested
in telephony or networks, information or media studies, business
or labor history, or cyborgs.<br>
<br>
Sebastian Giessmann, University of Siegen, “The Strowger Gambit:
On How (Not) to Automate Telephone Switching”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Mara Mills, New York University, “Overload: Switchboard Automation
and the Disability History of 0s and 1s”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
We welcome your news! Please email <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:info@mercurians.org">info@mercurians.org</a> and include
your name and organization, if you are affiliated with one.<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://mercurians.org/news-and-announcements/">https://mercurians.org/news-and-announcements/</a><br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
AR Dr. Sebastian Gießmann
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/medienwissenschaft/personal/lehrende/giessmann_sebastian">https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/medienwissenschaft/personal/lehrende/giessmann_sebastian</a>
Sprechstunde DI 17 Uhr: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://u-si.de/PDqYj">https://u-si.de/PDqYj</a>
Raum AH-124 | Zoom | +49 271 740-2586
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.sebastiangiessmann.de">http://www.sebastiangiessmann.de</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de">https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de</a></pre>
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