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  • Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
  • Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
Richard John . Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2010. viii + 520 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-02429-8, $39.95 (hardcover).

"Information," said Slavoj Žižek in a recent interview, "is our commons," just as land and property were the commons of the industrial revolution. Intellectual property is the new enclosure (The New Review, July 27, 2010). Information may be our commons, but Žižek is missing at least half the story. Arguably access to information depends more upon regulation of the networks by which it is collected and distributed than on intellectual property. From the post office to the Internet, it was ever thus. How were these networks constructed? What impact did network building have on access to the means of communication?

More than economics or technology, argues Richard John, politics and culture shaped networks and access. Regulation mattered. Business strategy and the managerial corporation, contra Alfred Chandler, grew up in response to political economy. Politics defined the boundaries that divided industries; competition was always contrived. Network Nation is a sequel to Spreading the News (1998), John's history of the American postal system. It tells the story of the evolution of the telegraph and telephone from commercialization to popularization and to naturalization, when the network was "depoliticized" through the "seductive dogma" that existing institutional arrangements were rooted in technology and economics rather than politics and culture.

Until at least the 1880s, there was little expectation in the United States that the telegraph would serve as a mass medium. Although Abraham Lincoln believed the telegraph network would unite the [End Page 640] nation, business people and journalists were the principal users. Absent widespread public use, legislators considered government ownership unwarranted. Instead, competitive provision determined the level of public access. Corporations commercialized the telegraph under state charters. This "antimonopoly political economy" privileged competition over public utility. Consequently, telegraph companies never aspired to provide universal service. Before 1900, fear of regulation prevented Western Union from even attempting to compete in the letter-writing market.

Network builders were subject to political economy more than they were catalysts of it. Samuel Morse is important to this story for his inventions, but more so for his place in the history of patent rights. Western Union deified Morse to protect the broad patent it obtained from him. Corporations manipulated inventors' images to strengthen property rights and to meet the needs of the patent system. The image of the heroic inventor as an American civic ideal was a by-product. Likewise, the public reaction to Jay Gould's purchase of Western Union was more influential than his position of power at the company. The movement to regulate the telegraph, and to demonize the robber baron, began inside the New York business community, which hated Gould. It was a business-against-business reform movement, which historians focusing on agrarian and populist revolts have neglected.

The telephone emerged in a "progressive political economy" in which it was presumed that economic consolidation hastened technical advance. Public utility was privileged over competition. Municipal franchises limited the number of telephone operators. Which operators received franchises was therefore politically contested. To avoid extortion by city aldermen, telephone operators appealed to the public by expanding their services. The "fractiousness" of the political economy, the "cupidity" of city councils, and the "threat" of government intervention were engines of innovation. Telephone subscribers popularized the telephone only unintentionally.

Expansion gave rise to a mandate for universal service. This mandate was to provide low-cost local telephone service and to combine it with low-cost long-distance telegraph service. Hence, Theodore Vail bought Western Union. To avoid regulation, Vail expounded the misleading but influential view that telecommunications regulation was not a problem of politics and culture but of science and economics. To fault operators with dominating telecommunications overlooked the extent to which a network capable of providing a universal service was critical to the nation. The regulators demurred and the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was obliged to dispose of its Western Union stock.

Network Nation is an admirable replacement for Alvin Harlow's Old Wires, New Waves (1936) and Robert Thompson...

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