The same innovations probably also contributed greatly to the enclosing of much commercial activity. Inventions like the telegraph and the telephone made physical presence unnecessary for communication and thereby reduced the need to be out and about. Innovations in printing (combined with increasing literacy) strengthened reliance on newspapers as another medium of communication, and at least some huckstering activity moved out of the public space and into newspaper pages. Ironically, greater advances in technology, the radio, and television, would place the urban citizen far more at the mercy of the sellers than were his preindustrial counterparts. The latter, at least, could escape the "hard sell" by going home.

XREF: Connects to Laterza's broader argument about the privatization/enclosure of commercial activity and the changing nature of public space.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 328