Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information CapitalIn the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new—the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today’s communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status—from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today. |
Contents
Basement floor plan of Londons Central Telegraph Office 1891 | 24 |
Gendering the Central Telegraph Office | 53 |
View of the Central Telegraph Stations provincial gallery 1874 | 60 |
Bodied Telegraphy | 67 |
The West End scandals some further sketches 1889 | 127 |
GPO telegraph girl in London 1917 | 156 |
Voices on the Wires | 158 |
Advertisement for Bells telephones 1877 | 162 |
Jessie Kenney disguised as telegraph boy 1909 | 187 |
| 241 | |
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Agitation became boy labor Boy Messengers Britain British Cambridge Central Telegraph Office chapter City Civil Service Cleveland Street Scandal Clinton communications Culture District domestic drill Dublin Easter Rising Edwardian electric Electric Telegraph elite employees employment exchanges female operators female telegraphists Gender GPO executive GPO officials GPO secretary GPO’s Henry homoerotic Homosexuality imperial Irish Jeffery Joyce July late Victorian liberal London telegraph male telegraphists Manchester mediation messages modern National Telephone Journal Newlove night duty nineteenth Oxford University Press Pall Mall Gazette physical political Post Office Rifles Post Office Workers postmaster postmen PTCA Report Routledge Royal Mail Scudamore Se Defendendo servants sexual shillings sorters strike subscribers Swinscow Technology tele telecommunications telegrams telegraph boys telegraph messengers telegraph network Telegraph Service Telegraph Street telephone operators Telephone Women tion twentieth century uniforms urban wages wires women telegraphists working-class young Youth