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

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

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