摘要：Although politicians and private companies were the driving forces of the early Italian telephone, this paper aims to understand why and how between nineteenth and twentieth century users influenced the evolution of this new medium. First of all they set up a continuous dialogue with other social groups. In telephone books private companies gave suggestions to subscribers and, indirectly, they showed the allowed (and not allowed) uses and, finally, which were the users’ wishes. Subscribers pressed also politicians for obtaining a more efficient and geographically diffused telephone service: they organized themselves in cooperatives, they created associations and, in general, they set up influential lobbies. Secondly subscribers imposed many way of use that forced changes in telephonic administration. For example, for long time Italian telephones were managed with flat rates: the amount of use didn’t influence the final billing and subscribers often lend their telephone. This social practice, called “parasitism” by politicians and companies, forced major changes in rate’s politics. Finally, subscribers tried to “metabolize” this new medium using it in “unexpected ways”: the telephone was used as an alarm clock, as a tool for knowing the time, for fishing, for surgery, even for knowing the quality of wines. All these aspects will be researched using a corpus of sources like technical journal, newspapers, parliamentary debates, literature of fiction, telephone books.
关键词：History of the Telephone; Italian subscribers; alternative uses; media co-construction
