Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

In the early years of the 20th century, advertisements for the telephone—especially those created for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T)—did far more than sell the public on telephone service. They can be seen as constituting a pedagogy of modernity that was instrumental in shaping modern conceptions of time and space in the social imagination. This essay draws on numerous examples of telephone advertising and illustrates how they deployed representations of time and space in the discursive construction of speed as a product of the telephone. The author argues that the tropes of speed engaged by these advertisements aligned the possibilities afforded by modern technology with the acceleration of capitalism itself.

Keywords

time and space advertising telephone 20th century social imagination

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adam, B. ( 1995). Timewatch: The social analysis of time. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

AT&T Archives. (1992). Events in telecommunications history. Warren, NJ: American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Carey, J.W. ( 1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society . Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.

Carnegie, A. ( 1886). Triumphant democracy. New York, NY : Scribner.

Casson, H.N. ( 1910). The history of the telephone. Chicago, IL: A. C. McClung.

Caulkins and Holden Inc. (1927, June 29). Your world has changed. Advertising and Selling , p. 15.

Giles, R. ( 1928). Buying for a rise in tomorrow’s product trends . Advertising and Selling, p. 23.

Green, V. ( 2001). Race on the line: Gender, labor, and technology in the Bell system, 1880-1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Griese, N.L. ( 1977). AT&T: Nation’s oldest continuous institutional advertising campaign. Journal of Advertising, 6(3), 18-24.

10.

Harvey, D. ( 1989). The condition of postmodernity. An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.

11.

Jameson, F. ( 1988). Cognitive mapping. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 347-360). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

12.

Katz, J.E. ( 1999). Connections: Social and cultural studies of the telephone in American life. London, England: Transaction.

13.

Kern, S. ( 1983). The culture of time and space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

14.

Laird, P. ( 1998). Advertising progress: American business and the rise of the consumer market. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

15.

Lefebvre, H. ( 1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford, England: Blackwell.

16.

Marchand, R. ( 1985). Advertising the American dream: Making way for modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

17.

Marchand, R. ( 1998). Creating the corporate soul: The rise of public relations and corporate imagery in American big business. Berkeley : University of California Press.

18.

Martin, M. ( 1991). "Hello Central?" Gender, technology, and culture in the formation of telephone systems. Montreal, Ontario, Canada: McGill Queens Press.

19.

Marx, K. , & Engels, F. ( 1970). The German ideology. New York, NY : International Publishers.

20.

Noble, D. ( 1977). America by design: Science, technology, and the rise of corporate capitalism. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

21.

Tarbell, I.M. ( 1936). The nationalizing of business 1878-1898: Vol. IX. A history of American life. New York, NY: Macmillan.

22.

Tichi, C. ( 1987). Shifting gears: Technology, literature, culture in modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

23.

Updegraff, R.R. ( 1927, April 20). Tomorrow’s business and the stream of life. Advertising and Selling, pp. 44, 49.

24.

Wiman, E. ( 1889, June 15). Speech to the New York Electric Club. Electrical Review, p. 3.

Saving Time and Annihilating Space: Discourses of Speed in AT&T Advertising,1909-1929

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References