Bills, Emily (Author)
This dissertation seeks to establish the telephone as a critical but unrecognized component in the development of Los Angeles into a major metropolis. It begins in 1880, when telephone lines bound the greater Los Angeles area into a comprehensible whole, and concludes in the early 1950s, when telephony became closely aligned with domestic activity in the home. It takes as starting point the view that it are the social conditions of production under capitalism that largely determine the physical configuration of settlement patterns and telephone infrastructure can be understood as a valuable component of that process. For example, the dissertation considers how the establishment of an extensive telephone 'network' was the first significant step toward drawing Los Angeles together as a unified region, both physically and psychologically. In so doing, it also refutes generalized interpretations of Los Angeles as a 'fragmented' city by detailing how patterns of telephone installation reveal a vast, but coordinated metropolis comprised of a strong central city linked to other 'hubs' of production and settlement. Four areas of inquiry delineate the telephone's influence on varied layers or spheres of space. The first chapter suggests that the spread-out composition of Los Angeles' mixed-use economy, together with the wiring efforts of city boosters, encouraged intense telephone dissemination across the region. Chapter two reviews AT&T's early efforts to encourage subscribers to view the space of the nation telephonically, and then applies this perception to the local level by detailing how 'telephone traveling' requirements reflect particular patterns of correspondence in Los Angeles. A third chapter examines whether telephone companies believed their utility was a fundamental part of community building projects and, in turn, whether Angelenos attributed any importance to telephony as a component in the creation of attractive and stable neighborhoods. The investigation concludes by detailing AT&T's efforts to encourage architects and homemakers to perceive the house as a series of spaces fully linked both within and without by telephone connections. This multilayered survey ultimately cites Los Angeles as a starting point for inserting telecommunications into the larger story of the growth of the modern metropolis.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/06 (2006): 1949. UMI pub. no. 3221929.
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