La cite au bout du fil (review)

La cité au bout du fil. By Claire Poitras. Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2000. Pp. 323. $34.95.

Some important work on the social history of telephone technology has appeared during the past two decades, including Claude Fischer's 1992 book, America Calling. Yet there have been few case studies of discrete local contexts. Such is the project undertaken by Claire Poitras in La cité au bout du fil. Poitras focuses on the gradual building of the telephone network in greater Montréal between 1880 and 1930. This period, she argues, witnessed the success of the Bell Telephone monopoly in both linking a large and diverse urban/suburban population and creating a set of social norms that would be most conducive to profits from telephone subscriptions. Her book is a rich cultural history that draws extensively from primary sources, including Bell's own corporate records.

The first three chapters present background on the agglomeration of Montréal--an often troubled merging of diverse urban neighborhoods and suburban villages. We are reminded that Montréal was idiosyncratic in its bilingual status and, at the same time, prototypical in its means of coping with both immigration and an influx of rural residents. Here Poitras sets up later discussion of Bell's efforts to court Montréal's English-speaking business classes while strategically marginalizing French-speaking or immigrant members of the working classes. She also establishes the importance of public-service networks--sanitation, public safety, electricity, telegraph--to the transformation of a preindustrial urban landscape into one that would accommodate as well as reinforce the ideals of modernization.

When Poitras narrows her focus to the formation of Montréal's telephone network, she stresses the hegemonic role played by the Bell monopoly. Chapter 4 emphasizes the continent-wide connections of Bell and its executives. It becomes clear that, rather than addressing local concerns, Bell's management structure mostly emulated practices established by and for AT&T in the United States. Thus it is appropriate that chapter 5 highlights Montréal's unique social landscape, noting how Bell manipulated language and culture differences to maximize its profits.

For Bell, selecting a lucrative clientele and reinforcing social norms for telephone use went hand in hand with providing the service itself. While chapter 6 primarily gives statistical background on the evolution of telephone technology, the next six chapters detail Bell's public relations and marketing campaigns. Here, Poitras supports her assertions that Bell was less than populist in its efforts to provide "universal" service in Montréal.

Chapter 7 looks at Bell's market research aimed at predicting future phone use on the basis of the financial and cultural capital apparent in given neighborhoods. The focus of chapter 8 is the strategic use of architecture-- in buildings ranging from corporate headquarters to corner phone booths--to create a favorable image of the company. Chapter 9 details Bell's efforts to replace Victorian such social practices as handwritten correspondence with new telephone-specific traditions and etiquette. Chapter 10 follows with a broader demographic portrait of Montréal's early telephone subscription patterns.

Together, chapters 11 and 12 create a picture of how Bell publicity positioned phone service both as indispensable to the existing social structure and as heralding a utopia where the entire wired world would become a "telephone neighborhood." Poitras looks specifically at Bell's appeals to businessmen. Phone service, its promoters claimed, would provide security in the domestic sphere while also allowing the household's daily functions to better serve the breadwinner personally.

Diverging from the preceding material, chapter 13 deals with regulatory debates and economic concerns about the placement of telephone poles and lines. Chapter 14 similarly deals with public controversies, over increasing phone rates as well as changes to the rate structure itself. Both chapters consider the role--largely ineffectual--of local, provincial, and federal regulatory bodies in reining in Bell's expansionist efforts.

While Poitras's attention to political...