by Bill Ives
December 26, 2007 at 4:00 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
I really liked Rob Paterson’s post, History of Social Media, as well as the earlier one on More on War as the Accelerant for Social Software, where he also looked at some of the historical aspects of social media. Trains and planes have transformed how people connect and transformed the world as a result. However, the history of connections and social media is often one step forward and one step backward. Many of the early forms of connecting were more social than some of the stuff that replaced them.
In the late 1890s my great aunt liked to listen to music but the only place that you could hear music was the saloon in her newly-organized town in the Oklahoma Territory. In her day, this place was not appropriate for young single women. Fortunately, she was the first telephone operator in the town. So she called the saloon and left the line open, getting “piped in” background music, while she worked, whenever the band played. There was an added benefit to this technology. She was able to also hear whenever a fight broke out in the saloon, a frequent activity, and notify the local police by running a flag up a pole at the telephone office across from the police station. These features, piped-in music and location monitoring, have taken on new forms and become disaggregated from her primitive phone lines.
There were other added social aspects to this early social media. My great aunt operated a system of 64 phone lines. She became known in town as the “hello girl.” She was also at the center of social connections so people called her or stopped by when they wanted to find someone or find out what was really going on in town. As mentioned, above, she could leave lines open. In addition to getting music from the saloon, she also kept an open line to her fiancée who worked at the bank. They could talk between tasks during the day, facilitating their courtship.
We lost a lot of this social nature by taking people out of the connections but the web is bringing it back in new ways. The other day, I listened to a live digital feed of Cajun music from one of my favorite music bars, Tipitina’s in New Orleans, while I blogged in Boston. So it has come full circle from my great aunt but now I can get music from many places besides the local saloon. Happy new year everyone. I will pick up this thread in 08.
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Fabulous story of connectedness.
In a similar vein, having a recent conversation with my mom about the process of being a switchboard operator at a regional hub helped me better understand the more organic aspects of the role they played. They physically managed the lines, opening and closing connections with patch cords. That meant that they were the routers too. For long distance, a call would be patched to a major regional hub and then to the individual city (can you imagine what that would look like with today’s voice traffic?).
They also would write down and report start and stop times of the connection: they were the feeds for the key data for transactions — minutes used. They had to manually write reports of the various minutes by line in daily batches.
Talk about load balancing, my mom talked about the time she was selected to go from Louisiana to West Palm Beach, to be put up over one winter in a woman’s home (all arranged by her employer, AT&T), to help handle the increase in call routing as the population swelled due to wintering snowbirds.
Imagine the cost of a call today with that model.
Bill Ives wrote @ December 26th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Paula Thanks for this additional story and additional context. When my great aunt was the telephone operator, it was for the local network. You had to go to another location to make a long distance call. The local network and the long distant network were not yet connected. But these were the days of real customer service before IVR destroyed it. Bill
Until about 12 years ago most of the rural lines on PEI were party lines - so you also could and did listen in to all your neighbours calls.
I wonder if privacy is over rated?
Bill Ives wrote @ December 27th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Thanks, Rob - I am old enough to remember party lines as a regular thing in the US even in cities and long distance being very expensive so no one I knew made many long distance calls. They were a big deal and were short. People still averted talking at length on long distance even when the rates went down because of this concern and the habits created. I always assume that anything I do on the web, including email, could be made public, and act accordingly. However, I just hope it is not my credit card numbers which I do use on the web. While I agree that privacy can be overrated, there are times when privacy is a good thing and that is why I dislike moves like Beacon in Facebook while I applaud most of the transparency in the new web. Bill
Funny how long habits remain - now with Skype many have no costs at all. A friend who travels a lot puts on Skype in his Hotel room and spends the night with his wife at home. They have dinner, watch TV and just hang out. I have not pressed him further …..
So new habits of being “On” the whole time are arising. Is not Twitter part of this?- I go nuts when Twitter is down now.
On the privacy front - I mean more the personal aspect of it. Funny how we in the west have become so solitary? Another friend from a very different background on PEI - 11 kids and a very small house - told me that none of his brothers ever slept alone UNTIL they got MARRIED!
Bill Ives wrote @ December 28th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Rob Nice comparison. Your friend is doing with Skype just what my great aunt and uncle did over 100 years ago with open photo lines. Good point with privacy. There is constant privacy and selective, momentary privacy. I have been on crowded consulting engagements were everyone was on top of everyone so there were no private conversations and you just adapted but you would always find a space somewhere, usually outside, where there could be a “cone of silence” for a private conversation. There you could often be seen but not heard, like the front porch swing for courting. Bill
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