Technologies are often designed and manufactured in ways that allow the tasks and responsibilities of paid employees to be systematically reassigned to their customers. Jobs are usually lost when customer services are reorganized into self-service, but the work seldom, if ever, disappears. When telephone operators, bank tellers and other customer service jobs are eliminated, what happens to the work? How is it done, by whom, and with what degrees of acceptance, enthusiasm and ingenuity? To answer these questions, this dissertation describes the historical development of telephone infrastructure, networks and protocols in the United States, and analyzes them as means by which employers and service providers have transferred a substantial amount of work from their employees to their customers.

Whenever we log on to a network today, for example, we begin by performing the basic technological function of establishing a telecom connection of one sort or another, whether or not we pause to recall that these connections originally were the job of telephone (and telegraph) operators to establish. Telephony was originally sold as a service – not a technology – and telephone connections were the provenance of operators. The most fundamental historical observation resulting from my dissertation research is that people had to grow accustomed to placing telephone calls on their own, without assistance from operators, before the telephone could mature and expand into the American self-service technology par excellence.

After describing, in the introduction and first chapter, the arrival of self-service (and the telephone) in everyday American life, this dissertation elaborates the development of the telephone as a self-service technology. In the middle chapters I present case studies of the rotary dial and the touch-tone keypad as the foundational and pivotal remediations, respectively, of the home telephone into a multi-purpose (and all-American) self-service technology. The fourth and final chapter presents a case study of the automated teller machine (ATM), describing it as descended, in part, from the telephone, as well as a transformative self-service technology in its own right. The conclusion explores cell phones as a next chapter in the future of self-service and its telemediation.