Kotamraju Nalini

Pushers, Plumbers, and Pediatricians: The Symbolism of the Pager in the United States - 1975 to 1995

Abstract

Sociology of culture studies often discuss the capacity of capitalist institutions to control and to co-opt the symbolic meaning of material objects, including the association between consumer goods and particular communities. Most of this literature has focused on consumer goods that are seen as expressing identity and social relationships particularly well, such as clothing and music, I argue in this paper that communication technologies also have the ability to convey rich symbolic meanings. I analyse the symbolic meaning of the pocket pager, as represented by U.S. newspapers from 1975 to 1995. While the pager traditionally has been associated with ³respectable² people such as emergency professionals, I show that for a brief period in U.S. history­coinciding with the U.S. ³war against drugs²­the pager evoked a more ³disreputable² group of people: drug dealers, gang members, and non-white people. I document the ways that various institutions­pager manufacturers and service providers, public school boards, and city councils­reacted to the pager and, of course, to the communities it symbolized.