Abstract:

This article explores a discursive debate that occurred during the mid-twentieth century among telephone users, institutional actors at Bell Telephone and American Telephone & Telegraph, and Bell Labs' engineers regarding the meaning of the term "information." Telephone subscribers' use of telephone directory formats, so-called misuse of the information operator, and resistance to all-number calling clashed with telephone system engineers' definitions of information. This article argues that the telephone system rather than computing technologies served as a primary technological site of negotiation wherein a nonexpert definition of "information" was conceived by the general public during the twentieth century.