[1348] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Electrifying America
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff.Ogden@um.cc.umich.edu)
Mon Sep 16 22:42:37 1991
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 91 22:42:06 EDT
From: Jeff.Ogden@um.cc.umich.edu
Reply-To: jogden@merit.edu
To: com-priv@psi.com
I came across this in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review:
Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940
by David E. Nye, 479 pp, The MIT Press
I haven't read the book yet, but the review by John Stilgoe had
several statements that caught my interest:
"Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology,
1880-1940" focuses on electricity as an "enabling technology,"
as something that made other things happen.
Mr. Nye examines the electric streetcar whose speed helped turn
"the urban landscape into a spectacle" almost as quickly as it
became "a vehicle of political ideologies." Corporate ownership
of streetcar systems first alerted urban Americans to the
dangers implicit in corporate ownership of electric utilities,
....
Three definitive chapters follow, on ..., and the enduring problems
of delivering electricity to isolated Americans, especially
farmers.
Seems like I've read about some of these same themes on this list.
-Jeff Ogden
Merit/MichNet
