The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age, by MacDougall, R.

Abstract

We seem increasingly captivated today by the metaphor of Main Street and Wall Street and the dualities it engenders: community and capital, values and value, morals and money, the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft, the country and the city, the local and the global. We seem less devoted, however, to the connections between them, both figurative and literal. That we easily transgress the boundaries between the local and the global is a hallmark of globalization and the networked society, but less investigated are the physical properties of these transgressions-how do we communicate between the country and the city, the town and the metropolis,