Selected Responses to Ronald Kline's
Consumers in the Country
Ronald Kline's Consumers in the Country was not the book I wanted
it to be, and I'm rather bitter about this.
In this book, Kline's thesis is very clear: Farm men and women
used the new communication, transportation, household technologies
selectively and creatively in a way different from the what the
promoters anticipated, creating their own version of modernity. In a
world, they were not passive recipients of modern technologies, but
active agents of technological changes.
Kline wrote a history that emphasizes more on the active agencies
of the American country people to resist the technology uses advocated
by the government or large corporations, and to create novel uses of
the modern technologies by their own.
The metropole was not a single bounded location far from the
country. Rather, it was a giant web of power lines, telegraph lines,
transport corridors, and commodity flows that touched every point in
its hinterland. Could Kline have told a more interesting story if he
had looked at the geography of telephone, radio, and automobile
consumption?
I don't really know what Kline means by "rural." ... I can think
of many ways one might define "rural": distance from the downtown area
of the largest nearby metropole, population density, state of mind,
ownership of Ford F-150s, ratio of sheep to people.
By considering only farm families, is Kline helping to perpetuate
some of the stereotypes he is trying to challenge?
Kline sets out a powerful methodological framework for this
book. At the heart of his project is to show the dialectic
relationship between technology writ large, and society. By this he
means that social change is not entirely driven by technological
change, but in fact is embodied in and drives technological change. To
put it another way, when technology pushes, societies push back.
I should say that I have been sick for a week, and this no doubt
colored my reading.
I also found his idea of subversion of technology interesting, and in
particular his discussion of the ways in which people appropriate
technology for uses other than it was intended, in order to preserve,
maintain or strengthen their existing cultural or social patterns.
with the exception of brief nods to reinforcing or subverting
gendered identities, I find myself somewhat at a loss to understand
how rural identity changed (or was transformed, as the penultimate
page suggests), or even what it was before the technological
transformation.
I don't know what the "identity" was that underwent change with
the introduction of the technologies he considers.
Consumers in the Country is a title that I find evocative of a
whole set of subjects I am really excited about. During this time period
rural residents bought and used different technologies that completely
changed the way they farmed their land, built their houses, and thought of
themselves.
...numerous quotes from rural people with names like " Beulah," "Willet,"
"Mary Meek," and "Elbert" reminds us all to be grateful of a recent
level of urban social influence in the naming babies department.
What does he mean by rural population? By 1940, the majority of people
living in rural areas were not farmers, but simply residents of very small
towns. Kline seems to equate "rural" with "farm," and his argument is much
weaker because of this.
How and why did he choose the gadgets and gizmos that he did to
prove his (horribly worded) thesis that "Farm people created new
technologies and new forms of life...that helped to (re)invent rural
life" ?
Ultimately, the lopsided job he did of covering three
techno-gadgets in a hundred pages and then one alphabet soup
mostrosity in the next hundred did not sit well with me. I found
myself much more engaged with the gadgetry sections.
This was an interesting book that certainly added to my
understanding of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
and on a topic that clearly intersects with the more urban focus of
the planning field which tends not to address the rural beyond the
pastoral suburbs. Perhaps Kline's book should have been re-titled
'Producers of Electricity in Rural America' or some such as this
seemed to be the tale he really wanted to tell!
his substantial discussion of the producer side of the electricity
narrative does leave one wondering about the outcome of the remarkable
tension between education and sales from the consumers'
perspective.
Maybe its after reading Cronon, but Kline's style was bumpy, and I often
felt that my initial interest was pummeled to death with snippets of
information in his attempt to paint a full picture of rural life from
midwest to northeast.
His grouping of the small subsistence farmer with the larger dairy
or crop farmer is problematic.
Kline's book touches on an aspect of the city-country dichotomy that Cronon
never makes much of, namely the way that urban people created stigmatized
identities of rural populations by caricaturizing their relationships with
technologies.
Kline's stories of the introduction of telephone and automobile
technologies have quite similar structures: First there is resistance,
then reluctant adoption, then unique and unanticipated applications,
and finally an urban reaction.
I will not forget the picture of an automobile running a washing
by belt on one of its wheels.
What is technological determinism? Is it the belief that the
introduction of technology to any culture or environment results in
the same final results? Or does it even go further than that and
claims that the way technology is introduced in any society also
follows the same process (steps) everywhere?
In general, I think his book was well researched. His account of
telephone, radio and especially electricity was very detailed based on
his background as an Electrical Engineer.
Does the adoption of new technology always represent "modernization"?
After Cronon's beautiful story in Nature's Metropolis, Kline's
Consumers in the Country appears a little dry. It neither has the
eloquence nor the depth of analysis.
How could he leave out indoor plumbing? Come on, man!
Technological determinism? Social construction? Urban/rural
dichotomies? Postmodern identity issues? Indoor plumbing is your
ticket!
In brief, although Consumers in the Country was not a smooth exciting
read (especially compared to last session's reading) I appreciated
Kline's general ideas and framework. His emphasis on the fact that the
farmers actually had control over the technologies which they were
starting to use is necessary. However, it seems that most of his
chapters don't go in depth enough to really follow the approach he has
set out for himself.
I thought Kline's descriptive analysis of the rural adaptation of then
modern technologies as the the automobiles and telephones was quite
insightful. I particularly liked Kline's emphasis that electrification
was of great importance in this modernization process.
Kline sais "Consequently, I use the word (modern) in a more
restricted sense than most contemporaries used it, as a relative term
(relative to time, place and culture) referring to the process of
using new technologies to make life up-to-date, that is, modern."
(p. 8) Somehow, this struck me as a bit circuitous -- modernity is the
process of making modern???
I would like to know whether his descriptions of moderization of
the rural landscape can be used as an archetypical model for the
introduction and integration of any type of material technology from a
source of more advanced technologies to a sink of less advanced
wares. It would be interesting if one could model and extrapolate the
constant features of such introductions throughout history. Perhaps it
would even give us a better understanding of what exactly technology
is?