Abstract

This article examines the history of AT&T’s 1964 Picturephone. Analyzing advertisements, corporate documents, and news reports, it explores how the discourses that surrounded the Picturephone united fantasies of telephony and televisuality to imagine the device at the center of America’s domestic future. AT&T described the Picturephone as enhancing familial intimacy and domestic efficiency, while journalists often saw its presence in the home as a threat, capable of shattering illusions of domestic perfection. This article contends that the discourses that surrounded the Picturephone ultimately represented an acknowledgment that domestic idealism was merely an illusion exposed by the Picturephone’s gaze.