Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users Telephone Training Films, 1927-1962

Telephone Training Films, 1927-1962 I 487
Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective

Users: Telephone Training Films,
1927-1962
D. Travers Scott
4 С "T^shaw!" mutters Grandpa. He is indifferent, if not directly hostile,

l-^to the arrival in his unspecified rural U.S. community of a new
JL telephone technology. Telephone users will soon input numbers
directly, and dial tones will replace operators. Mother and Father smile, shaking
their heads at Grandpas foolish resistance to progress. His perky young grand-
daughter looks up from her homework to proclaim that she thinks modern
telephones are "Yummy!"
This scene from the 1 940s short film Dial Comes to Town suggests a moment
of American technological history and its representation that also illustrates
how Americans were instructed and constituted as proper technology users. In
"'Slow and Low Progress,' or Why American Studies Should Do Technology,"
the introduction to a special technology issue of American Quarterly, Carolyn
de la Peña writes that "a legacy of positivism has embedded our political, social,
and cultural systems with a disturbing patina of technological 'neutrality.' And,
in many ways, we as scholars have contributed to this legacy of positivism by
failing to critique technology as both substance and ideology in American
cultural life."1 She urges that "it is time to revitalize a 'technology studies'
core within our field" and reviews a rich body of technology scholarship that
intersects with the core interests of American studies: power, consumption,
and meaning-making.2 Peña concludes that
considering these books, and placing them within the canon of the field, is a good start
if we hope to better understand how technological assumptions guide the production of
all knowledge; enable assessments of desirable bodies, people, and nations; and cultivate
particular manifestations of power.3
In the five years since that issue was published, few essays in American Quarterly
have explicitly addressed technology as their main subject.
©20 1 1 The American Studies Association
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488 I American Quarterly
Drawing on approaches from the interdisciplinary conversations of sound

studies, this essay explores a historical role of a sound technology, telephony,
in assessing desirable people, especially ideal and sanctioned consumers, as
conveyed by instructional films from the 1920s to the 1960s: Now You re
Talking, How to Use the Dial Phone, Dial Comes to Town, three Operator Toll
Dialing shorts, and Century 21 Calling? They range from three and a half to
twenty minutes, and all except Now You re Talking wert produced by or with
American Telephone and Telegraph. I examine their common visual and sonic
representations of telephonic experience, particularly the avoidance of inter-
subjective intimacy, and argue this relates to maintaining social hierarchies.5
During this period, successive iterations of telephonic technology were
rolled out at different rates across the United States. While other communica-
tion technologies also participated in linking the national expanse, creating
a mediated public sphere, and disciplining subjects, telephony is unique in
several qualities. It was immediate (unlike print or film), two-way (unlike
radios eventual development), and largely operated and experienced directly
by its users, with the exception of operator assistance (unlike telegraphy).
Comparatively, telephone users had more agency and participation in this
national electronic medium, making their protocols of usership more neces-
sary in establishing proper technological citizens, particularly given a medium
primarily of sound, which has been theorized as especially relevant for the
constitution of subjectivities.
To understand the entanglements of technologies with power, consumption,
and meaning-making, it is important to examine our conceptions of ourselves
and others as users, to explore the ideals and expectations of technology use as
far from neutral, incidental, or naturally occurring, but constituted through
complex, multiple, and often conflicting streams of material, discourse, and
institutions. The seven instructive, commercial films examined here are explicit
discourses in the constitution of users and technological subjects. Literally,
they instruct: Here is how to be a good user. I focus on films intended to train
users of a sound communication technology because they foreground sound
as a vector of disciplinary practice - constituting ideals of "sound" listening
and speaking practices and practitioners - and they de-emphasize the more
familiar sense of sound as illustrative or emotive (e.g., sound effects, musical
soundtracks). This is intended to align with a sound studies perspective of
elevating listening as a critical sense and sounds as objects of study in their
own right, rather than as secondary to or in support of the visual. Telephone
training films are explicitly about aural acts - speaking, hearing, listening - and
about being proper, mediated, sonic subjects.

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After examining how this sound technology and its sonic experiences are
represented visually and aurally, I argue that the essence of telephony's sonic
experience - intimate intersubjectivity - is largely missing from these films'
educational depictions of telephony. Telephony offered new degrees of private,
person-to-person, immediate connection, yet the institutional discourse of
these disparate films works to foreclose such potential emotional circulation.
Intended to instruct on usage of telephony, they in many ways avoid or at least
fail to express the very nature of this communication system - a technology
about intimate, interpersonal connection through mediated sound. Across
these films, opportunities to convey or suggest the intimate intersubjectivity
at the heart of telephonic experience seem frequently missed. These depictions
contribute to constitutive discourses of telephone usership; they help define
who is a proper or sound telephone user and what ideal telephonic practices
are. Yet such discourses are also entangled with other flows of social meaning-
making and power relations, just like the technologies themselves. In mapping
the contours of good and bad users, telephone training films harness social
stereotypes pertaining to gender, age, and race, imbuing seemingly neutral
technological practices with hierarchical power relations of different social
categories. This suggests what might be the specific threat from intersubjectivity,
namely, empathy. Although these films do not explicitly instruct users to avoid
sharing emotions, they do reinforce values of emotional restraint by dodging
telephony's intimate intersubjectivity.6 In hearing the words and sounds of
others across social boundaries, the intimate sonic sharing of experience and
sentiment might reveal that those boundaries are not merely permeable but
perhaps even meaningless. Finally, I conclude with a postscript on methodologi-
cal concerns related to employing sound studies in technology scholarship.
Intimate Intersubjectivity, Sonic Empathy, and Telephony
When discussing instructional media and communication technologies, par-

ticularly from a critical/cultural perspective, it is important to think beyond the
obvious functions of information exchange. While the sharing of information
can certainly challenge (or reinforce) existing power relations, the additional
exchange of emotions can be an equally, if not more, constitutive and disci-
plinary force. Much work in the "affective turn" of critical/cultural studies in
recent years has sought to draw attention to this neglected area of scholarship,
drawing, for example, on Raymond Williams s concept of "structure of feel-
ing" - the cultural experience of a given era's felt, widely held emotions - as
an early predecessor of analyzing emotions as productive of culture and not

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merely reflective expressions of it.7 More recently, Lawrence Grossberg has

argued for cultural scholars not to conflate meaning with representation, to
heed emotive aspects of meaning-making, and not to reduce emotion simply
to libidinal drives.8 In reviewing these and other affective scholarship, Jennifer
Harding and E. Deidre Pribram call for a cultural scholarship on emotion and
power, arguing that
emotional relations do not exist between people in some kind of equivalency or equilib-
rium. Emotions are utilized in the exerting and reaffirming of power differentials. But how
emotions circulate and subordinate as they are relayed throughout the social formation is
complex, constantly changing, and insufficiently understood.9
It is the circulation and relay of emotions from one person or social group to
another that the present essay addresses. However, I am concerned less with
specific acts of producing specific emotional states, or particular meanings
or identities made affectively, than with institutional responses to potential
emotional circulation, how people are instructed to properly use technologies
that offer new capabilities for intimate inter/subjectivity.
Intersubjectivity is a liminal space between subjectivity and objectivity, when
experiences and feelings are shared by more than one individual consciousness,
not merely in the sense of exchanged information but shared experiences that,
in turn, interactively construct social lives. Intimacy refers to physical and
emotional proximity or closeness, and, as suggested by the physical and emotive
connotations of "closeness," intimacy suggests impending, nascent, or potential
empathy. I employ the phrase "intimate intersubjectivity" here to reinforce the
meanings of each, to underscore that intimate closeness is not merely a matter
of physical proximity (even if replicated virtually in what media scholars refer
to as "presence"),10 nor is intersubjective sharing merely informational. I also
use the phrase to gesture toward its potential outcome or threat: empathy. Em-
pathy refers to a specific form of intersubjectivity, when the shared experiences
are explicitly emotional. Moreover, intimacy is not necessarily empathy, but
it is often a necessary precondition or first stage of it. True empathy involves
feeling what another feels, with the implication being you will understand
that person, help that person; to a degree, you will become each other as that
person's joys, pains, needs, and desires become yours. In The Cultural Politics
of Emotion, Sara Ahmed argues for the sociality of emotions, that feelings are
not merely something we have but are produced by capitalism's circulations
of objects and that emotions, in turn, are constitutive:

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Emotions create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish
an inside and an outside in the first place. So emotions are not simply something "I" or
"we" have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that
surfaces and boundaries are made: the "I" and the "we" are shaped by, and even take the
shape of, contact with others.11
The films I examine here avoid telephony's intersubjective intimacy, I argue,

precisely because of the threat its potential empathy suggests for social hier-
archies and divisions.
Listening is an interior biological activity of sound waves entering the body

and vibrating internal bones. It is a literal invasion of borders, a transgressive
penetration of an individuals boundedness. Theodor Adorno describes listen-
ing to the phonograph as a boundary-blurring process: "The individual . . .
abandons himself, in a kind of active receptivity, to that toward which the
materials are striving on their own . . . [in] nothing less than the mediation of
subject and object."12 Roland Barthes associates listening with intimacy and
constitution of subjectivity: "The injunction to listen is the total interpellation
of one subject by another: it places above everything else the quasi-physical
contact of these subjects (by voice and ear): it creates transference: 'listen to
me means 'touch me, know that I exist!"10 This touching, this knowledge, is
sonic empathy, a process Jon Cruz describes in his analysis of American slave
songs as a crucial empathetic link in the abolitionist movement: sound not only
provided for expression, community, and identity building among enslaved
populations but also was a medium by which whites came to share their slaves'
feelings and to understand them as fully human.14
Specifically in regard to telephony, if speech is the expression of inner
thoughts and feelings, converted into sound waves, then conversational listen-
ing consists of another's inner thoughts and feelings, now mediated, getting
inside your head and affecting your body. Telephony can be understood to
amplify this in its two degrees of collapsing distance. Most obviously, the other
speaker is no longer in the same general space as you but up to miles away,
the physical distance underscoring his or her sonic closeness by contrast. On
a more intimate level, the phone receiver touches or nearly touches your ear.
Gone is the polite distance of personal space maintained when conversing in
the physical presence of another or when viewing visual, screen-based commu-
nication technologies, replaced by the device directly touching a bodily orifice.
As Jonathan Sterne has described, social mores of class- and gender-inflected
physical contact lie at the cultural origins of sound reproduction technology
in the development of medical techniques of mediate auscultation (using a

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stethoscope).15 An 1 887 Scientific American report on visiting the central office

of a telephone company suggests the liminal space of intersubjectivity:
The mysteriousness . . . ofthat part of the machine and its belongings that lies beyond ones
own instrument and that of the person at the other end. . . . Between us two there is an airy
nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else - Helloland, I should call it.16
Indeed, a 1970s review of experimental data comparing telephonic with face-

to-face communication concluded that there was no difference in terms of
information exchange and problem solving. The only difference found was in
opinion change - in which the telephone was more effective.17 Such social-
scientific data reinforce ideas of heightened intersubjectivity in telephony:
increased intimacy would facilitate the trust and persuasion involved in chang-
ing opinions. Arguably, telephony's intimate intersubjectivity is heightened by
the very absence of visual cues that could impede its growth, such as distracted
facial expressions or bored eye rolling: consider the contemporary parallel of
torrid romances spawned in text-based e-mail and messaging. More recent
theorizations of telephony also foreground intersubjective experience. Avi tal
Ronell writes that
the call transfers you to the Other. In this regard, calling might be viewed as perturbing
the self's traditional subjection of Other to itself. This goes counter to mainstream Western
philosophy, which traditionally holds the Other to be secondary to the self, the Other of
the self, the symmetry of self-duplication. Telephonies imposes the recognition of a certain
irreducible precedence of the Other with respect to the Self.18
In the films I examine here, however, instead of sonically replicating the

actual user experience of hearing the voice of someone far away, intimate in-
tersubjectivity is weakly suggested, avoided, or shown rather than heard - even
when it would have been technically quite feasible to represent. This seemingly
contradicts the explicit intent of the films. Films made to instruct users on
sound technologies are strangely silent on a key aspect of the experience. Proper
usership, then, is inscribed with degrees of proper intimacy.
Consider, for example, todays familiar complaint against cell phone users
talking in public, foisting their conversations on others and making them
"cell phone victims." Typically this is thought of as bothersome in the way it
transgresses public-private boundaries: the cell phone user is having a private
conversation in public. This is inaccurate. The irritation factor is not necessar-
ily dependent on the intimate nature of the conversations content; cell phone
users are irritating even when (especially if?) their conversation is related to

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everyday shopping, meetings, or other minutiae. Yet consider how there is

nothing wrong with these conversations if both parties are present: two people
walking down the aisle discussing what brand of cereal to buy is not improper,
but one person walking down the aisle, talking into a cell phone about cereal
brands, is somehow improper.19 1 suggest this is a residual behavior of what we
see in telephone training films: a discomfort with the intersubjective nature
of telephony. The conversation itself does not bother us; what is bothersome
is how the one-sided conversation announces the intersubjective experience
the user is having. The user is experiencing something, not private in the
sense of personal but, more accurately, intimate, in the sense of being close
to someone, and intimacy - sex, affection, emotion, fighting - is limited in
public by cultural mores of propriety. In cell phone etiquette as well as early
telephone training, we see evidence that the issue is not privacy but intersubjec-
tive intimacy. For example, Sterne describes a 1 902 kinetoscope, Appointment
by Telephone, in which an unfaithful man arranges a lunch date by telephone.
His wife finds out and beats him with an umbrella. Sterne argues this suggests
how sound reproduction and transmission introduced an ambiguity between
public and private spaces.20 However, it also supports my assertion that, more
specifically, intimate intersubjectivity is at stake, pathologized in the character
fault of philandering.
Intimate intersubjectivity was an issue in early American telephony. Dur-
ing the 1920s the telephone industry began changing from denigrating and
discouraging social calls to embracing and capitalizing on them. Originally,
educational and instructional guides insisted on using telephones for practi-
cal, business matters, not socializing.21 Claude Fischer describes an initial
crackdown on idle calls and unnecessary telephone use. Initially replicating
telegraphy, in which sociability was incompatible with price-per-word charges,22
a later embrace of sociability came about partly because of persistently sociable
users, and technical, economic, and other changes: "Much of the explanation
lies in the cultural mind-set of the telephone men. Originally slow to sell to
households at all, they were surely reluctant to encourage or endorse 'idle'
chatter. However, new leaders and a half-century s experience eventually led
to the solicitation of social calls as profitable new business."23
However, I also wish to underscore that disciplinary discourses must be
understood in a more complicated way than the explicit intents of technology
institutions. These films' ineptness with representing intersubjective intimacy
can be understood as a residual media practice from an earlier era: socializing
is encouraged, but its logical extension and more extreme version of empathy
and intersubjectivity is avoided.24 Business concerns were privileged over social

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concerns and public welfare, and telephone training films suggest a tension
between selling sociability and resisting the intersubjective nature of sound.
This could be also attributed to cultural factors, such as class- and race-based
ideals and standards of emotional reserve, thus suggesting a radical potential
of telephony and related technologies (two-way radio, etc.).25 In this way, these
telephone training films may not explicitly discipline users to be emotionally
reserved, but they do replicate such values by avoiding the elephant in the
room of telephonic intimacy and intersubjectivity.
Telephone Training Films: Techniques for Representing Sonic

Usership and Avoiding Sonic Intersubjectivity
Telephone training films are often neglected artifacts within cultural histories
and studies of telephony.26 Cinema scholarship tends to focus on representations
of telephone iconography and narrative symbology.27 Cultural histories tend
to rely on artifacts such as print ads, instruction booklets, public demonstra-
tions, and popular culture representations, such as songs, sheet music, and
motion pictures.28 Yet local distribution of 16 mm industrial films was long
recognized by AT&T as an important medium for distributing information
about the telephone, and also a popular one, with screenings often included
as part of motion-picture theater programs.29 Moreover, this was inclusive of
broader efforts: AT&T's "educational" efforts included not only their innovative
deployment of corporate public relations in the media (as part of gaining, then
maintaining, public approval of their monopoly) but also ads and circulars on
proper telephone etiquette and usage instructions.30
As these films visually and aurally represent telephony, telephonic intimate
intersubjectivity seems less than fully realized because of certain distancing
techniques and missed opportunities: linguistic representation, separating
speakers, sonic icons and infrastructure images, avoiding or abstracting usage
sounds, and, in one case, depersonalization. After describing this, I discuss
exceptions that come close to representing intimate intersubjectivity, and how
these suggest the films' use of social stereotypes in their constitution of users.
In Now Youre Talking, a silent short from 1927, the legendary animator Max
Fleischer and his brother Dave Fleischer use one of the most common tech-
niques of representing telephony: combining images of speakers with words.
Written language is one of the earliest visual representations of sound, and here
intertitles convey the spoken dialogue that could not be heard. The narrative
features a phone sickened and sent to the hospital via ambulance because of
an inappropriate user mishandling the device. We see a frustrated business-

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man speaking into his phone, and corresponding intertitles read: "What? You
can't hear me?" then "I can't hear you either! Why don't you talk into your
telephone?" Note the multiple degrees of distancing from the experience: as a
silent film, we cannot directly hear what the man is hearing - silence, static,
or the distorted voice of the user on the other end. The speaker must verbalize
his experience, introducing a degree of abstracted distancing, which is then
increased when his verbalizations are further abstracted into the symbols and
words of linguistic representation. We do not really know what he hears, but
have to surmise it from what he says, and even that is incomplete, for clearly
the man speaks more words than we see in the title cards.31 The mimetic
gap between experience and representation is wide, even in a film explicitly
created to teach about that experience to new users. Now You re Talking also
makes use of a visual representation of sound that predates abstract language:
onomatopoeia. Animations depict a phone emitting "RING," "BRRNG-G,"
and "BANG" when hung up too firmly, a lion's "G-R-R-R," fingers' "SNAP!"
and a sick phone's sneeze, "AH-CHOO!" However, note what is missing:
conversation or intersubjectivity. Efforts are made to convey the sounds of the
technological device, but not the simultaneous users.
Across these films, the lack of effectively representing telephonic intersub-
jectivity is more notable in contrast to the sophisticated and complex ways
the films do suggest intersubjectivity in forms other than telephonic conver-
sation. Now Youre Talking and the other silent film I discuss both combine
live-action and animated sequences, bridging two representational worlds,
and not merely through crosscutting. Now Youre Talkinghzs complex shots,
such as an animated ambulance within a live-action shot of a man's forehead,
simultaneously combining photographic, illustrative, and symbolic represen-
tational systems. Moreover, subjectivity is bestowed on humans ¿«¿/machines:
we see the telephone vary from being a neutral vessel conveying speakers and
operators to a sentient creature with its own subjectivity and voice, even to
the point of writing a diary.
A second film from 1927, How to Use the Dial Phoney is straightforward
demonstration lacking a fanciful plot. It also represents telephony through
images of speakers combined with words, but distances even further by never
providing title cards for what the users actually say. We see the female pro-
tagonist speaking into her phone, and we see telephone operators, but we are
never shown her words or even the operators' crucial "Number, please." Title
cards narrate only her actions, which viewers are meant to follow: "Listen for
the dial tone." While not symbolically visualizing speech, the film does attempt
linguistic description of other sonic aspects of user experience: "The dial tone is

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49¿ I American Quarterly
a steady humming sound indicating that the line is ready for you to dial"; "The
busy signal is a rapid buzz buzz buzz telling you that the called line is busy."
The film also animates onomatopoeic strings of "MMMMMMM"s coming
out of a phone earpiece in a wavy line to indicate humming. Here not merely
the symbols but the visual aesthetics of the words attempt to represent sound
through movement, graphic elements, and typography: a similar series of the
word "BUZZ" come out of an earpiece, pause in the right corner of the frame,
and quiver, drawn with squiggly lines. An intertitle reads, "The ringing signal
is an intermittent burring sound telling you the bell of the called telephone is
ringing," and this "burring" sound is conveyed through animation, this time
in full close-up, with a "B^R" jumping out of the phone in a clean, san serif
font (unlike title cards), landing large on the right side of screen, where the
type quivers and becomes squiggly, then stretches tall, visually suggesting a
modulating tone with an increasing volume or pitch. However, as with Now
Youre Talking, intersubjectivity is missing. These efforts represent the device,
not the users' conversation. Moreover, only a limited representation of one side
of a conversation is presented, but the exchange is not conveyed - the essence
of telephony.
Again, nontelephonic intersubjectivity is, by contrast, on ample display: How
to Use the Dial Phone does not mix animation and live-action within a single
shot, as does Now Youre Talking, but attempts something similar by using a
large white cutout of a pointing hand that enters into two live-action sequences,
combining photographic and illustrative modes simultaneously through analog,
in-camera techniques. Intersubjectivity is also conveyed through sequences in
which the viewer changes points of view. The viewer shifts from omnisciently
watching a woman use the telephone to taking her place, as sequences alternate
between full-frontal shots of the dialing woman, close-ups from her viewpoint
of her fingers dialing, and interri ties that directly address the audience-as-her:
"You have now dialed 3-6623 (Note: The dash (-) is not dialed.)." If we are
being positioned as the user, why can we not hear, or know more about, what
the user hears?
Dial Comes to Town is a sound film from the late 1 940s instructing rural users
on the new dial telephone system. It tells the story of a multigenerational family
as their community experiences the change from operator-assisted calls to dial
tones and direct calling. It is not only sound but also a longer, twenty-minute
film. Yet, throughout its telephonic conversations, we hear only the user, who
is shown visually. It exhibits the same convention of separating speakers seen
in the silent films, even though cinematic split-screen effects had been known
for over a decade, and, indeed, one of their earliest uses had been to show tele-

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phone conversation in Lois Webers 1913 film Suspense. In the training films
I examined, however, conversations are presented almost exclusively through
crosscutting, not split-screens or the even the less-complicated convention of
hearing the user on the other end of the call in a distorted voice.
Another technique for representing sound in all of these films was the
use of sonic icons. Rather than attempt to replicate, convey, or suggest the
phenomenological experience of hearing, visual stand-ins are used, includ-
ing, predictably, close-ups of telephones. Dial Comes to Town features a more
spectacular version of this effect through a large demonstration prop: a giant,
blackboard-sized rotary dial used at a town meeting.
In Dial Comes to Town, and also in the Operator Toll Dialing shorts and
Century 21 Calling, usage sounds are avoided through omission or abstraction.
In all of these sound films, we do hear spoken dialogue, clicks, beeps, and oc-
casionally conversational voices. However, what is again surprising is how much
sound is missing from these sound narratives about using and understanding
a sound technology. To a large degree, they do not attempt to replicate the
user experience. Usage sounds are not experienced but externalized, described,
abstracted, or visualized. Dial Comes to Town features no intersubjective sounds
of users. We never hear anything that is not shown. We hear only when the
camera transports us there, despite telephony being a technology that obviates
the need for "going there." When there are intersubjective usage sounds of the
technology itself, such as rings and buzzes, they are externalized. Moreover, Dial
Comes to Town is specifically about a significant change in auditory experience:
the transition from operator-assisted to dial calling, a change that involved a
loss in degree of human mediation and increased immediate intersubjectivity
between callers: you connected to one another directly. Yet such a significant
sonic change is often conveyed through verbal abstractions rather than simply
letting the viewer hear the change itself: the phone company representative
Mr. Johnson tells the crowd, "Instead of hearing the familiar 'Number please,'
you will hear the dial tone, which says the same thing, electrically." When
technophobic Grandpa finally tries dialing when no one's looking, he listens,
then says aloud, "Yes, that's the right noise." He dials, then says to his friend,
"Real nice and clear, too, isn't it?" In both of these scenes, usage sounds are not
experienced but described, abstracted, and visualized. This slavish adherence
to realism - this is how a town hall would really happen; this is what it would
really be like to observe someone using the phone - could be an aesthetic
choice, but why replicate a live demonstration when the capabilities of cinema
allow one to better replicate the actual user experience? Moreover, strict realism
does not seem to be a necessary convention of telephone training films, from

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the talking telephone that catches a cold in Now You re Talking to Century 21
Callings theme-song proclamation, "You can telephone a star!"
The Operator Toll Dialing films are three 1949 sound shorts instructing
telephone switchboard operators: Teamwork, Cord Signals, and Dialing, Speak-
ers are separated in these films again: external users are never shown and rarely
heard. Even when teaching the internal users their jobs, of which conversations
with external users were a crucial part, the conversational experience is mostly
absent. Sonic icons are employed here, and in several other films, including
images of sonic infrastructure, such as switchboards, wires, relays, building
exteriors, and telephony equipment. Most of these are not illustrative - that
is, they do not accompany matching sounds of telephone conversations. For
example, in Teamwork, a narrator informs us that an operator must collect
overtime charges on a coin telephone call that has exceeded its initial deposit.
We see an indicator light flash on the switchboard, but do not hear any of
the significant and sensitive conversational moment when the operator must
announce that the caller has gone overtime. We only see a close-up of the
operator in a headset and hear her say, "One moment please." Then, for seven
lengthy and unusual seconds of silence, we watch her fill out a paper ticket
and operate her switchboard from an overhead shot, too distant to effectively
communicate the detailed procedures of her operating the machinery. Thus,
much like linguistic representation, sonic iconography performs a distancing
act, representing an aural, intimate, intersubjective experience through images
of solid, singular, often inorganic objects. Usage sounds are also avoided: these
shorts generally feature no intersubjective sounds of end users or machines.
We do not even hear clicks or busy signals; we merely see silent, flashing lights.
Century 21 Calling, г. 1962 sound film on a future telephony exhibit at the
Seattle Worlds Fair, also separates its speakers, mainly through crosscutting.
Also similar to the Operator Toll Dialing shorts, auditory signals are converted
to flashing lights, with buzzes and rings shown instead as blinks. This would
have made more sense in the silents, but these are all sound films. Remember,
too, that these are not merely informational but instructional: communicat-
ing the idea of a sound signal through a visual flash is one thing, but when
training people to listen for and respond to sound signals, why not simply
play the sounds? Why the additional level of mediation? While there are a
number of possible explanations for this and other incidents of failing to con-
vey aural intersubjectivity, my point is the larger pattern in which repeatedly,
in multiple ways, across varying types of films and years of production, the
nature of telephony is not merely presented but taught in a manner that is less
direct than it could be. As for avoiding usage sounds, Century 21 Calling does

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Telephone Training Films, 1927-1962 i 499
convey some, but largely through a realism similar to Dial Comes to Town by
mostly, but not exclusively, conveying sounds only when they are ambient, as
if heard by a bystander. As viewers, we generally do not hear what characters
hear when putting receivers to their ears. For example, we hear the external
screech of Bell Boy, an early pager, but not the signal the girl placing the call
hears to let her know her page has gone through, although she clearly reacts
to hearing something. During a demonstration of automatic dialing, we hear
the clicking of punch cards, but not what the kids hear as they take turns lis-
tening to the receiver, in a significant omission of a key auditory part of user
experience. Nor do we hear the actual tones in pushbutton dialing, only clicks
of buttons and rotary dials, nor the sounds of a call going through when the
girl beats the boy in a speed-dialing contest. The sounds of the film are those
of an observer, not the actual user. Yet even ambient sounds are incomplete:
the vocal interactions between the boy and the girl are rarely heard; her quip-
ping, "I beat ya!" is one of few moments of their dialogue overheard, another
missed opportunity for intersubjectivity in the form of conversation. Indeed,
sometimes visible dialogue between the girl and boy is missing, even though
we hear a person near them speaking.
A final technique of distancing and avoiding intersubjectivity appears in
Century 21 Calling, the only film to suggest future innovations. The teleology
of telephony is shown to be depersonalized, not between people at all, and even
nonaural. It is predicted that the telephone will be used to remotely control
the kitchen oven, home air conditioning, and water the lawn. Significantly, the
future of an audio technology - as depicted in conjunction with a worlds fair,
an event all about technological progress narratives - is shown to transcend
sound and intimate, intersubjective communication.
Exceptions: Intimate Moments
There are moments in most of these films that come close to representing
intimate intersubjectivity, and I suggest these function as limit cases identify-
ing usage boundaries. Significantly, these moments tend to involve different
social hierarchies.
In Now You re Talking, three moments verge on intersubjectivity, with the
telephone bringing together persons of different genders, races, and social
classes, but the film retreats into distancing techniques. The potential for
connection, intimate intersubjectivity, and empathy is sounded, then avoided.
First, when the animated version of the protagonist answers the phone, we
see a speech bubble rise from his earpiece containing an unseen operators

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"NUMBER PLEASE!" This is immediately followed by his mouth moving

and emitting a speech bubble containing "BRYANT 0-7-6." This moment
expresses the telephonic experience of hearing both sides of a conversation. It
immediately retreats, however, and in the rest of the sequence we see him speak
six more separate bubbles of text to the operator, but we do not see anything
emit again from the earpiece, even though he is clearly reacting to things the
operator says. Surely there are possible material reasons for this - saving time
and effort in animating unecessary dialogue - but it seems that expressing the
two-sided nature of a call would be particularly relevant in a telephone train-
ing film. This scene progresses to the call being placed incorrectly, and for the
first time we see the other end of the call: the lions cage at a zoo. The African
American zookeeper answers and speaks three times, but we see neither his
words nor those he hears. The scene cuts back to our protagonist, whom we
see speak, "YAAS, I WANT TO SPEAK TO MR. LYONS." The film returns
to the zookeeper, and now we see him speak, "AH WAS FEEDIN HIM,
SAH, AND HE BIT ME!" From this, the film cuts to seeing its protagonist
hang up. While this sequence briefly shows two sentences from both sides of
a conversation, it does so with crosscutting, a convention common to these
films, but one that denies the actual experience of telephony. The whole point
of telephony is collapsing distance: you do not have to go thereto hear the per-
son with whom you are speaking. You can both stay where you are physically;
the telephone brings together callers into temporal, experiential simultenaity
without spatial proximity. Crosscutting, however, denies this. It does not bring
the callers together visually or spatially within the frame. It goes back and forth
in a volley, traveling between their separate spaces. It does not use more of
the simultaneous speech bubbles within one physical location, or split-screen
effects, to more accurately represent telephonic conversation. It uses alterna-
tion, not simultaneous juxtaposition. Even in its final sequence - the only
other two-sided conversation in the film - the live-action protagonist talks to
a live-action nurse, both of whom are shown not only through crosscutting
but also through sandwiching the words of their intertitles between repeated
shots of the same speaker, effectively segregating them. He speaks, we see his
title card, he speaks more. She speaks, we see her title card, she speaks more.
Repeat. The title cards juxtapose only the words and images of the speaker,
not the listener, in this brief conversation.
In Dial Comes to Town, potential intimate intersubjectivity between the
organization and the individual(s), the business and the consumer - as well as
the educated, presumably urban Ms. White and the less-so rural audience - is
ultimately distanced through technological mediation and performance. The

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one time we do hear usage sounds of clicks from dialing and the switch hook
is when Ms. White is not really calling another person but merely demon-
strating onstage at the town meeting. She listens to a handset, and then flips
a separate switch on the giant demonstration dial mockup, which broadcasts
the dial tone on a loudspeaker, allowing the audience to hear. To underscore,
a close-up shows her hold her handset out to the audience, a gesture akin to
todays reality-TV convention of putting phones on speaker to broadcast a
conversation. Ms. White demonstrates a ring tone and busy signal similarly.
In the Operator Toll Dialing shorts, other than the narrators voice, almost
all of the sounds are voices of operators, and these generally are in conversa-
tion not with external users but with each other, demonstrating teamwork
by asking each other for favors and happily replying "Surely!" many times.
While working as a team is clearly perceived as an important aspect of the job,
listening to customers is surely even more important. Yet there is hardly any
sonic representation ofthat, suggesting an intersubjective threat between the
business organization and the consumer, between the operator-as-mediator
and the technology end user.
Century 21 Calling has two exceptions. In a film-within-the-film segment
illustrating call forwarding, we see a woman answer the phone and hear a
distorted male voice on the other end ask for Diane, but then the rest of the
sequence uses crosscutting for their conversation. Again, a gender difference
is bridged, and, significantly, intimacy is underscored by the romantic content
of the call: the couple is not married, and her expressions of enthusiasm sug-
gest he is a suitor. In a film-within-the-film illustrating call waiting, we see a
female caller whose call is interrupted, and hear the same alert beep that she
hears announcing another incoming call. However, this is again the sound of
the technology, not the other person, and, indeed, we do not hear the voices of
either person she talks to on either call. One is a female friend; the interrupting
caller is her husband, bringing a male friend to dinner, whom she instructs her
husband to reprimand for not bringing his wife. Again, gender differences and
heterosexual coupling suggest an intimacy the film avoids. These exceptions
demonstrate the technological capability and willingness to create audio ef-
fects that illustrate what callers hear, and visual techniques, such as the matte
effects of the films-within-the-film (much like the mixed illustration and live
action in the silents), evidence a visual capability for showing intersubjectiv-
ity through effects such as split-screen. The film could better demonstrate
telephonic experience, but does not.

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Constituting Users: Reinforcing Pathological Stereotypes
These telephone training films seem to avoid or at least miss opportunities

to more accurately represent and convey the intimate, intersubjective nature
of telephonic experience, a strange omission in films intended to train new
telephone users. I wish to now consider this within a conception of these
films as constitutive of technology users and proper usership, and argue that
this is indeed part of their cultural work, evidenced by the way other subject
positions are also reinforced.
In addition to their overtly instructive intent, these films are also disciplinary
in a broader sense of social normalization. That is, they reinforce their depic-
tion of good, normal technological subjects through contrasting examples of
bad, abnormal subjects. Although they do not name or classify such subjects
in the explicit manner Michel Foucault describes in the constitution of sexual
deviants or the insane,32 or more recent scholars describe with specific regard
to mediated subjects,33 1 argue a similar process is nonetheless at work. These
films are but a small component of many streams of discourse on how to be
a good, normal, or ideal user of an electric communications technology, from
overtly instructional films such as the telephone training to warnings of users
sickened by TV addiction or computer-keyboard carpal tunnel syndrome, to
recent panics around texting while walking or driving. All of these are ab/nor-
malizing discourses that constitute our sense of a good user or proper usership.
In terms of abnormalizing discourses, they are part of a process Sander
Gilman, among others, refers to as pathologization. He writes that "the very
concept of pathology is a line drawn between the 'good' and 'bad.'"34 More-
over, Gilman traces how pathological stereotypes, such as those related to
race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, operate with an associative, mutually
reinforcing logic. Assigning people, attributes, or behaviors to normal and
abnormal categories is more convincing when they correlate to existing social
categories. For example, as I discuss in detail elsewhere,35 one is more likely to
conceive of the cause of a fatal train collision as a bad user - an engineer who
was texting while driving - when one learns that the engineer was also gay,
Latino, and rumored to be a mentally ill, homicidal pedophile. Pathological
stereotypes reinforce and support one another.
These films are clearly discourses on appropriate technological subjects and
usership. They not only overtly instruct but exhibit the technique of reinforc-
ing vectors of pathologization that Gilman describes, for example, How to
Use the Dial Phone and Dial Comes to Town associating stereotypical feminine
clumsiness and predilection for gossip with improper telephone usage. Now

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You re Talkingaiso deploys racial stereotyping in its depiction of the zookeeper.

Mostly denied voice, he mistakes a wrong-number call for "Mr. Lyons" as a
call for the lion, to whom he serves tea, only to be attacked. Racial and ethnic
humor was not uncommon in depicting new media use: the first-ever million-
selling comedy record in the United States was "Cohen at the Telephone," a
1916 routine of a stereotypical Jewish mans ineptitude with the new device.
In Dial Comes to Town, age is associated with abnormal usership. As younger
characters explain, Grandpas dismissive reaction to the new telephony paral-
leled his previous encounter with a new washing machine. Dial Comes to Town
pathologizes the elderly and nonurban users as irrationally resistant to techno-
logical progress and specifies an inappropriate user of a party line as an older,
matronly woman, who receives dirty looks for her eavesdropping at the town
meeting. That film depicts what Fischer notes, that conflicts over appropriate
phone usage were most commonly associated with rural users, and that female
users were most associated with trivial conversations.36
Indeed, in How to Use the Dial Phone, it is a young, attractive woman who
must learn appropriate usage through trial and error. During two examples
of what not to do, a strange, white, cardboard cutout of a male hand appears
in the frame of an otherwise realistic, live-action film. A title card reads, "You
will get the wrong number IF - Dialing is started before taking the receiver
off the hook." A close-up of the phone directory and phone follows, then
a more extreme close-up of the female protagonist s index finger correctly
engaging the rotary dial for five digits (at the edge of the frame the receiver,
unmolested). In the next shot, however, we see the bad example: a medium,
over-the-shoulder shot of the woman dialing features the white hand in the
left of the screen, pointing to the phone receiver. She incorrectly lifts this
during the dialing process, and the pointer hand disappears. This repeats in a
subsequent demonstration: "IF - the switch hook is moved accidentally during
the dialing process." We see the young woman full-front now, but she seems
busy, preoccupied, and not paying attention as she reaches for something on
her writing table and bumps the switch hook accidentally with her arm and
loses her call. Having to hang up, she frowns. The masculine white hand directs
our attention to the switch hook the entire time. (This shot is either the film's
conclusion or where the currently archived copy has been severed.) The hand
literally illustrates male authority in guiding us through the errors of feminine
technological use and, as a communicative indicator, suggests male authority
in the feminist-Lacanian sense of the Symbolic-as-patriarchy.37 As we watch
a woman stumbling through inappropriate dialing, in an instructional narra-
tive on being a good user, we see a literal and symbolic representation of male

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authority enter the film, penetrating its realism with symbolic, communicative
artifice. Moreover, the viewer of the film is positioned as a good user by being
able to read this: literate in the English language and viewing conventions
of early silent cinema, possessing symbolic competency in knowing what to
make of a strange white drawing of a hand poking into the frame, and able to
coherently integrate all three. Such positioning of the viewer as a good user
pathologizes the female object of the film all the more through contrast and
differentiation as a bad user.
In sum, if these films are understood as contributing to discourses on
appropriate usership, a pathologized aspect of usership is clearly intimate
intersubjectivity. And, as certain examples suggest, this is perhaps threatening
in terms of intersubjective experiences between socially differentiated groups.
While these films can be understood as texts in discourses shaping appropri-
ate technological users and usership, by harnessing racial, gender, and ethnic
stereotypes, they also reinforce and constitute those categories more broadly.
Thus studying historical representations of appropriate technological use and
usership informs study of broader historical practices of constituting other
social categories and subjects. Furthermore, the intimate intersubjectivity of
telephony and its potential social threats offer a key stage in the genealogy of
contemporary technological intimacy, which scholars such as Dan Arav and
David Gurevitz argue has transformed into new forms intertwined in pleasur-
able and willing surveillance.38
Methodological Postscript
In this essay I have employed theories from sound studies as well as a sound
studies method of elevating in analysis sounds, sonic practices, and their
representations, discourses, and omissions. In doing so, several issues of meth-
odological concern are suggested for American studies scholars of technology.
One is the continued ephemerality of sound. While many recordings do
exist, sound studies calls attention to ambient sound as well, which is often lost.
The silent films discussed here were never truly lacking sound: there were noises
of crowds and projection systems, audience responses and interaction, and some
form of live music or sound effects or both accompanied many silent films. In
the case of my two films, however, and silent instructional films in general, I
do not have data on the aural aspects of their original context. Further work
on ephemeral films such as these could look for clues to context and reception
perhaps in diaries of viewers or corporate records regarding their screenings.
Another issue is the need for not only studying the histories of sound tech-
nologies but also unearthing the actual sounds ^/technologies. For example,

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some of the telephone sounds Ms. White demonstrates in Dial Comes to Town
are surprisingly unpleasant. The ringing bell is familiar, but the dial tone, busy
signal, and ring signal are loud, grating mechanical sounds closer to a buzzer
than the smoother electric sounds I recall from at least the 1970s onward.
Perhaps this is the "brrng-g" sound referred to in How to Use the Dial Phone.
Perhaps earlier phones sounded like this, or perhaps the sounds are exaggerated
here for effectiveness in demonstration. However, this uncertainty attests to
the lack of examination of sound in histories of technological user experience,
and areas for further research.
Finally, I suggest that the resistance or at best ineptness in conveying tel-
ephonic experience in these films may also suggest evidence of what might
have been truly new about the telephone. In other words, it can be inferred
that this degree of intersubjectivity was something truly new - a claim media
scholars today debate and make with increasing judiciousness.39 This suggests
a method for media scholars and historians to determine what was actually
new about a medium - versus "always already new," as Lisa Gitelman titled
her book.40 Looking for what aspects of a mediums experience seem resistant
to representation, or are represented in seemingly awkward, indirect, or inept
ways, could be a methodological tool: a gap in confident representational
practices may be a finger pointing to the new.
Notes
1. Carolyn de la Peña, "'Slow and Low Progress,' or Why American Studies Should Do Technology,"
American Quarterly 58.3 (September 2006): 915.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 939.
4. Dial Comes to Town (Loucks and Norling, AT&T/Bell, Western Electric Recording, late 1940s); Now
You're Talking, directed by Dave Fleischer, scenario by Max Fleischer (Inkwell Studios, 1927); How
to Use the Dial Phone (AT&T/PT&T Bell System, 1927); Century 21 Calling, directed by Robert
Larsen (AT&T, Western Electric Recording, Jerry Fairbanks Productions, 1962); Operator Toll Dialing
shorts: Teamwork, Dialing, Cord Signals (AT&T/Bell, Western Electric Recording, 1949). For more
on instructional, ephemeral, orphan, or sponsored cinema, see Henry Habley, "Industrial-Sponsored
Films: Telephone Film Distribution," in Ideas on Film: A Handbook for the 16mm Film User, ed. С.
Starr (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1951), 123-25; Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, Films
That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2009); Devin Orgeron, "Conference Report: Orphans Take Manhattan: The 6th Biannual Orphan
Film Symposium, March 26-29, 2008, New York City," Cinema Journal AS. 2 (Winter 2009): 1 14-18;
Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Founda-
tion, 2006); Sean Savage, The Eye Beholds: Silent Era Industrial Film and the Bureau of Commercial
Economics (muster s thesis, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 2006); Science, Industry, and
Education: Program of the Orphan Film Symposium 5, March 22-25 (Columbia: Film Studies Program,
College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina, 2006).

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Telephone Training Films, 1927-1962 I 487

Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective

4 С "T^shaw!" mutters Grandpa. He is indifferent, if not directly hostile,

©20 1 1 The American Studies Association

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Drawing on approaches from the interdisciplinary conversations of sound

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Intimate Intersubjectivity, Sonic Empathy, and Telephony

When discussing instructional media and communication technologies, par-

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merely reflective expressions of it.7 More recently, Lawrence Grossberg has

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The films I examine here avoid telephony's intersubjective intimacy, I argue,

Listening is an interior biological activity of sound waves entering the body

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stethoscope).15 An 1 887 Scientific American report on visiting the central office

Indeed, a 1970s review of experimental data comparing telephonic with face-

In the films I examine here, however, instead of sonically replicating the

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everyday shopping, meetings, or other minutiae. Yet consider how there is

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Telephone Training Films: Techniques for Representing Sonic

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Exceptions: Intimate Moments

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"NUMBER PLEASE!" This is immediately followed by his mouth moving

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Constituting Users: Reinforcing Pathological Stereotypes

These telephone training films seem to avoid or at least miss opportunities

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You re Talkingaiso deploys racial stereotyping in its depiction of the zookeeper.

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