Prelinger Archives: Town and the Telephone

https://archive.org/details/Townandt1950
I apologize for the length, but there is some really great stuff in the beginning and in the end that's pertinent to our class! But to get a full understanding, watch the whole thing.


The fictional "Mytown" is your typical American town of the 1950's. The family and community dynamics are very average to the time and overall comes off as a very well-oiled and prosperous town.
The success of the town and of the people who reside there is spun by the Bell Telephone company to be due to the integration of the telephone and the duties of their workers everyday. The company does make some very important points throughout the video. It shows how it connects businesses and people together like never before, and on how new information and help is readily available to them like never before through 4-1-1 and 9-1-1.

With some help from the dramatic music, you have to agree that the prosperity of Mytown owes a little bit to the popularity of the telephone, or even just to the overall progression of communication technology. The narrator says, "There's a sense of growing prosperity, growing pride, and growing happiness." In order to stay a promising society, the newest communication technology had to be installed in the town. Today, our communication technology is different, yet the idea of communication tech having an influence on prosperity still holds true.

This movie also shows that the sophistication of communicating has changed through the times as well. Instead of communicating and solving problems on a local level, this is now done on a global level. It makes me wonder if the more complex a communication technology is, such as the internet and the computer, the more prosperity it can bring than a less complex system, such as the telephone can. Or, I am also curious as to the change of wealth/growth of a 1950's "Mytown" over time compared to the change of wealth/growth of the entire world due to these two separate communication technologies....
I think this video is a great starting point into diving deeper into the idea of success and technology, and to really find out if this propaganda of a sort is right in their claims.