Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications, From The Post Office To The Internet

Dan Schiller

Mey 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Kuchazwe ngu-Christopher Douyard

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Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on United States telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary United States political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled United States imperialism through a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of United States telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative-and contested-political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

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Dan Schiller is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Telematics and Government; Theorizing Communication: A History; Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis; and Digital Capitalism

Christopher Douyard took the backroads to audiobook narration, though he is no stranger to performing. Christopher has nourished a passion for books and storytelling since his youth, when he would devour Tolkien and the Encyclopedia Britannica with equal abandon. He records from his studio in central Connecticut.