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Title: Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America by Ronald R. Kline ISBN: 0-8018-7115-8 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Meticulous research
Comment: This book is an in-depth exploration into the social forces behind the adoption of 4 technologies into rural American households in the early Twentieth century: the telephone, the automobile, the radio, and electricity. The book also describes some of the social changes that came about as a result of the adoption of these technologies.
The book is divided into three section. The first section looks at each of the technologies in turn. The second deals with rural electrification, and the third sums up the material. Also included are appendices, with much statistical data about the technologies, endnotes, an annotated bibliography, and an index.
Personally, I found the first section most interesting. It was fascinating to read about attitudes towards these technologies before they came to be seen as necessities. Indeed, as Kline describes, rural families were doing just fine without them, and often resisted the technologies when they were first introduced. But the social possibilities brought by the telephone and radio did provide a welcome social outlet, especially for women. Between listening in on party lines (which Kline is careful to point out was done by both genders), and listening to music and talk shows on the radio, women found that the hours spent in housework seemed to go by faster, even if the number of housework hours weren't necessarily shortened by technology as predicted by home economists of the times. Indeed, some of Kline's most interesting points were about economists and home economists of the early Twentieth century. One reason why policy makers thought it was so important for farm families to modernize and take up the new technologies was that they wanted to stem the flow of people leaving farms to work in the cities. Looking back from our perspective today, it's much more clear that the reason people were leaving the farms was to head for the greater economic opportunity of the city, not to improve social conditions. As farm technology improved and farmers became more efficient, each increment of farm production would have become less valuable- -if the government really wanted to keep people on the farms, they should have restricted farmers from acquiring technology instead of encouraging it. Kline describes how farmers came up with their own creative uses of technology, based on their real needs, rather than on what the experts thought they needed. They hooked up machinery including clothes washers to the axels of their cars instead of using the gas engines that had been built for these purposes, they used automobiles to plow their fields before diesel tractors were developed, and they used telephones to broadcast home concerts for the enjoyment of all their neighbors.
I found the minute detail of the second section dealing with the political history of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to be a bit overwhelming. Kline did some extensive research to complete this section, and it is all very well documented, but general readers might have found a more broad overview a little more palatable. The discussion of how the REA had to find ways to get farmers to increase their electric usage was particularly illuminating. As Kline describes the situation, once farmers were connected to a central power station, all they wanted to do was to run a light bulb or two and maybe a radio. But such light usage would not allow the electrical co-op to pay off its loans for stringing the lines, so the REA promoted all sorts of high energy consumption appliances, from electric ranges and hot water heaters to milking machines. It took some 20 to 40 years to get farmers to start consuming enough electricity to make their connections to the grid worthwhile to the co- ops. So how much longer will it take to convince regular consumers as well as farmers to reduce their consumption of electricity? Something tells me once habits have become ingrained into the culture, it's easier to build demand than to decrease it.
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