Gary Johnson
Mr. Ron Bergevin
U.S. History A , 3rd Period
12 November 2005
Call Home, ET: How AT&T Made America Love the Telephone
In the last hundred years, technology has pushed us through
two eras (agricultural and industrial) and propelled us into a third (the
information age) with such dazzling speed that we often find it difficult
to explain what has happened to us. We see the advance of this technology
as a mixed blessing - as a cold, impersonal force that has taken control of
our lives andas an exciting, liberating creation that has expanded and
enriched our lives.Perhaps the most effective way to explain our ambivalent
attitudes toward technological progress is to study the way one
corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph, has used advertising to
create and exploit our need for a personal relationship with an impersonal
system.
On March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell first
transmitted the human voice over a couple of wires, he faced the same
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