What’s New with Wu

I have never been the biggest fan of Jurgen Habermas- he is hard to understand, and his interest in never-ending public sphere dialogue remind me of an endless faculty meeting.

But I must admit that lately I’ve been turned on lately to his whole Lifeworld writings and the colonization thereof.  Maybe this happens to everyone once you reach a certain age, and decide that in a sense what you are fighting for and yearning for in nearly everything is a sense of informality and humanity in the environments and relationships you live in .

Bell’s engineers had an answering machine invented by 1935.   However it wasn’t until 1980 or so that answering machines became widely available - why?

Interestingly, according to a great paper by Mark Clark that I came across recentlt, internal memos show that Bell was afraid that if there existed recording devices, people would stop using telephones.

Quoting from my book:

Internal memoranda show AT&T certain that recording devices, if widespread, “would greatly reduce the use of the telephone.”   The idea was that the potential of a record of a conversation would make people unwilling to use the phone – either for fear the record would be used to contradict contracts, or because people would want to speak about illegal or immoral matters.     The mere technical possibility of recording conversations would “change the whole nature of telephone conversations,” and “render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed.”

The lesson from this is that it isn’t always textbook reasons that are offered for suppressing products - but sometimes just pure wierdness.