For an entire generation after the telephone was introduced, the Bell system managers resisted its use for social purposes.  Yes, there are memos and reports from the early years saying that managers were trying to get people to stop gossiping on the telephone.  The president of Bell Canada, in 1890, complained he couldn't stop trivial conversations, and a manager in Seattle in 1909 wanted to limit use of the telephone for purely idle gossip.

By 1928, a frustrated advertising guy said that this approach of treating the telephone seriously "is about as commercial as if the automobile people should advertise: ‘Please do not take out this car unless you are going on a serious errand. . . . ‘ We are faced, I think, with a state of public consciousness that the telephone is a necessity and not to be trifled with, certainly in the home."  In other words, the telephone was being sold as something necessary and serious, rather than conversational.

The Bell System felt that the need for telephones should be created by focusing on emergency uses, not sociability.  (These managers weren't at all confident that people actually needed these magnificent instruments, and wanted the surest sales pitch they could find -- particularly one that would be effective on anxious parents and farmers.)  Sales manuals from the 1920s to 1935 focused on emergencies.  Not until the late 1920s did advertising begin to even mention sociability.

Why did it take an entire generation for a shift to advertising sociability to occur?  Not, according to Claude Fischer's terrific essay "Touch Someone:  The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability," because of economics.  Many of the big cities were pay-by-calling-volume from the beginning.  And many of the flat rate rural areas stayed flat rate, even after sociability was recognized.  Nope -- this lag can only be explained because of the cultural background of the telephone men.

The first telephone men, you see, had been telegraph men.  They thought of telephones as just like the telegraph -- something you used for urgent business messages and alarms, never for chatting.  Only when the telegraph tradition loosened its grip on management did sociability become a selling point for the telephone.

Now we live in a world where some very powerful companies with connections to sell to the internet are made up of telephone men.  Or cable men.  They see the internet as just another network, and they're used to a world of competing proprietary networks that sell packaged services to passive subscribers.  They think of the internet as just like the telephone.  In the meantime, in a span of years far shorter than a generation, some other people have shown up who don't have this mindset.

And now we're having a tussle.  Not only are these new non-telephone men used to a lot of sociability, they're also used to helping themselves (who needs E911?) and building resources collaboratively.  A new kind of consumer is online, with different expectations and different abilities. 

Unfortunately, the telephone men and the cable men have a pretty strong hold on policymakers.