Book review: Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers

Abstract

Laborie’s chapter illuminates this point by discussing the formation in 1947 of the International Telephone Consultative Committee (CCIF), an effort to separate the political from the technical spheres; however, the entanglement of these two arenas wasn’t quite eased. The political struggle over technical standards surrounding data networks is also illustrated by Valérie Schafer, a case which the international standard for videotex was contested by states fighting for competitive advantage in this new market, with the ITU – through its Consultative Committee on International Telephony and Telegraphy (CCITT) – playing a central role in this techno-diplomacy; though, like Winseck, Schafer notes the diminished role of the ITU over the internet. These three themes in the volume are far from mutually exclusive; rather they are tightly intertwined, though the elements are unevenly emphasized throughout the chapters as the authors offer an in-depth exploration of the complex processes of “techno-diplomacy” within the ITU. Balbi and Fickers’ edited volume is more than the history of the ITU and politics of technological change. By locating the ITU as a nexus of transnational politics surrounding ICTs, it uncovers the making of global telecommunications from the 19th century to the present. Historians and media scholars have long studied the history of telecommunication from the point of view of states, militaries, multinational corporations and financiers;3 however, this book offers that history from a transnational perspective which adds another dimension to the inquiry that widens the current scholarship.