Paradoxically, the advent of modern communications meant that the over-worked administrator became more, rather than less, out of contact with his flock; he communicated by telephone instead of riding out by horseback, as in the good old days, to stay overnight in the various douars. Many inhabitants in the remoter mountains of the Aurès and Kabylia never saw a European in their lives, their sole contact with France being through a caid, bachaga or the hated local tax-collector.

QUESTION: How did the shift from horseback visits to telephone communication reshape colonial governance and native perceptions of French authority?

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 95