MSTU4016-08/Discuss 11

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November 12
Interrogating the Media I: The Telegraph

Discussion Question
  • Discussion leader: Kristina Fell
Required Readings
  • James W. Carey, "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph," Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 201-230. Read
  • Carey Clip 1: What interested you in the telegraph? Watch
  • Carey Clip 2: The telegraph reconfigures culture Watch
  • Carey Clip 3: Time and the telegraph Watch
Supplemental Reading
  • James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), Introduction, pp. 1-27 Read


Contents

[edit] Communication as Culture

"Communication, exchange, motion brings humanity, enlightenment, progress and that isolation and disconnection are evidence of barbarism and merely obstacles to be overcome." (Schivelbusch, 1978: 40)


According to Wikipedia, "Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of written messages without physical transport of letters."

I

  • The telegraph is one of the least studied technologies, yet it set the stage for future communications of this nature, including fax, email, and computer networks in general. The telegraph was important for four reasons:
    • "It was dominated by the first great industrial monopoly - Western Union, the first communications empire and the prototype of the many industrial empires that were to follow." (p. 201)
    • The telegraph was the foundation of the electric goods industry and "the first to focus on the central problem in modern engineering: the economy of the signal." (p. 202)
    • It "brought about changes in the nature of language, of ordinary knowledge, of the very structures of awareness. It replaced "traditional literature with a new and active form of scientific knowledge." (p. 203)
    • The telegraph "permitted for the first time the effective separation of communication from transportation." (p.203) Previously, messages were carried by foot, horseback, or rail. The telegraph now "allowed messages to be separated from the physical movement of objects; it allowed communication to control physical processes actively." Messages could be relayed quickly, which changed not only the scope of communications, but also the way that the railroad systems were conducted and business was exchanged.
  • Before the telegraph, business was conducted in by personal correspondence. (p. 205) The people conducting business most likely knew each other from face-to-face interactions. However, the telegraph allowed for impersonal relations to occur - relations between buyers and sellers whose business is merely business. "The visible hand of management replaced the invisible hand of market forces where and when new technology and expanded markets permitted a historicallly unprecedented high volume and speed of materials through the processes of production and distribution." (p. 205-206).

II

  • People, particularly religious personnel, were intrigued by the telegraph. Specifically, people were curious about electricity - "a force of great potency and yet invisible." (p. 206) However, this intrique also lead to an even greater spread of the Christian beliefs and messages, which inevitably lead to "saving the heathen, bringing closer and making more probable the day of salvation" (p. 207)
  • The telegraph also "promised to bind the country together just as the portents of the Civil war were threatening to tear it apart." (p. 207) By increasing communication, the telegraph was increasing the spread of knowledge, business, and ideas that helped save and shape the country after the Civil War.

III

  • The telegraph forced a standardized and structured way of expressing language. If the same story were to be understand across each state and across multiple newspapers, regardless of the agenda of that state or newspaper, the language had to be objective and universal. (p. 210)
  • In addition, it had to be concise, by just stating the facts. The cost of a telegram was based on word count and in order to save money, the words that were used had to be direct and to the point. (p. 211) No longer were elaborate details and opinions recorded and passed along, manipulating messages - "the story divorced from the story teller." (p. 211) As a result "[t]he spareness of the prose and the sheer volume of it allowed news - indeed, forced news - to be treated like a commodity: something that could be transported, measured, reduced, and timed." (p. 211)
  • The telgraph created a domain of empire. It allowed for coordinating miliary operations, created imperialism, created new forms of political correspondence, and inspired the rise of multinational business. (p. 212)
  • The use of the telegraph allowed railroad communications to increase, resulting in less transportation accidents, impending collisions, and unannounced delays. Before the telegraph, horses raced along the tracks, reporting on traffic and schedule times. "By moving information faster than the rolling stock, the telegraph allowed for centralized control along many miles of track" (p. 215)

The Reorganization of Commodity Markets

  • Before the telegraph, the costs of different products, such as wheat and corn, were priced differently in different markets. So each city had its own independent market that ran basically uninfluenced by the other markets. Thus, "the prices of commodities were largely determined by local conditions of supply and demand" (p. 216)
  • After the incorporation of the telegraph, the method of trading called "arbitrage" took place, which is "buying cheap and selling by moving goods around in space." (p. 216). Therefore, if you received a telegram that said that corn was $.10 per pound in St. Louis, and $.03 per pound in Cincinnati, you might buy your corn in St. Louis rather than in Cincinnati. Buyers and sellers no longer had to be constrained to their own city's markets.

How did this effect the markets?

  • Rather than relying on supply and demand in each independent market, supply and demand was based on all markets.
  • As a result, markets are evened out - the telegraph "eliminates opportunities for arbitrage by realizing the classical assumption of perfection information." (p. 217)

IV - The Creation of Time Zones

  • "Once everyone was in the same place for purposes of trade, time as a new region of experience, uncertainty, speculation, and exploration was opened up to the forces of commerce." (p.219)
  • Before time zones, every city in the American community "established its own time by marking that point when the sun reached its zenith as noon." (p.223)
  • With the advent of the railroads, local times across the board caused great confusion with scheduling. (p. 224)
  • "The control of time allows for the coordination of activity and, therefore, effective social control." (p. 224) Standard time was instated on November 18, 1883. Some religious groups thought that standard time went against the "natural order and denied the presence of a divinely ordained nature," but standard time prevailed.

[edit] Carey Clip 1

  • Interviewer: "What was specifically interesting to you about the telegraph that made you focus your attention on it?"
    • Carey
      • First wanted to examine the effect that satellite broadcasting and computers were having on communications, transportation, and markets.
      • Wanted to examine how computers changed the construction of airline companies and the mobility of this means of transportation. He then wanted to take a step backwards and find out where this construction came from.
      • This brought him to examine the railroads, stock market, and commodities market at the end of the 19th century as a way of understanding the telegraph, similarly to the way that satellite broadcasting and computers affected airlines, etc. at the end of the 20th century.
      • Believes that you must look at history in order to gain insight into the contemporary.

[edit] Carey Clip 2

  • Interviewer: "When one first reads your article on the telegraph, one might speculate that its direction is really to describe a change in the way that different transactions are executed. And then when you read it through once and you read it through a second time and a third time, you begin to grasp the fact that what you are interested in describing, it seems, is a reconfiguration of culture and even of the perceptual apparatus of individuals living in culture. Would you talk a little bit about that, and perhaps even reflect on any ways that you see any kind of analogous proposition as one might apply to our present age?"
    • Carey
      • The great attraction of the telegraph was that it drove down transactions costs. These costs are contracted when the flow of money is interrupted. These interruptions occur when a truck gets stopped at the border, different laws exist, etc. It's something in addition to the pure cost of production, transportation, and accounting.
      • The telegraph helped created one system of laws to govern all of the systems of commerce in each state. It nationalized the laws. "It imagined a borderless world, except the world it imagined was the United States."
      • "[People lived in] a system of social relations in which there was a uniformed culture dictated by the intermarriage of the system of communication and transportation."
      • A uniform national system of economics, politics, culture, and human relations was reconfigured simultaneously.
      • On the positive side, transaction costs were down, things were cheaper, you could buy products from anywhere in the US.
      • On the negative side, the rich regional diversities were whittled away into a more uniform culture.

[edit] Carey Clip 3

  • Time and the Telegraph
    • Time was based within each city based on when the sun was directly overhead. Thus, the time between different cities and counties was different because it takes the sun time to move.
    • This made the railroads and travellers unhappy because they couldn't coordinate their schedules.
    • Which city's clock governed the behavior?
    • Thus, the creation of standard time and time zones were implemented.

[edit] Supplemental Reading: The Control Revolution

  • "The origins and early histories of [societal transformations] and many other developments of comparable significance went unnoticed or at least unrecorded by contemporary observers." (p. 1) This is because transformations rarely result from single discrete events, and because "transformations are frequently distracted in the present by events with more dramatic and immediate in impact, but less lasting in significance." (p. 2)

The Control Revolution

  • The most important control technology of societal transformation, or the "Control Revolution," was bureaucracy. (p. 6) Revolution meaning "abrupt and violent change," (p. 7) and control meaning "purposive influence towards a predetermined goal." (p. 7)
  • During the Control Revolution, a revolution existed for all of the basic forms of communication, including photography, telegraphy, printing, the telephone, etc. (p. 7) A restoration also existed, in the attempts to restore the economic and political control that was lost at the local levels of society during the Industrial Revolution. (p. 7)
  • "A society's ability to maintain control - at all levels from interpersonal to international relations - will be directly proportational to the development of its information technologies." (p. 9)
  • "Each new technological innovation extends the processes that sustain life, thereby increasing the need for control and hence for improved control technology." (p. 10)

Crisis of Control

  • This also created a crisis of control, in which problems developed out of advanced industrialization (p. 10)
  • Resolution of the crisis demanded new means of communication and integration, or "the growing need for coordination of functions that accompanies differentiation and specialization in any system." (p. 11) In our case, the telegraph was this new means of communication.

Rationalization and Bureaucracy

  • According to Weber, bureaucracy was developed to as a control technology to serve as the "generalized means to control any large social system in institutional areas." (p. 13-14)
  • Rationalization was another control technology that Weber stated was developed in order to "increase control by the increasing the capability to process information. but also by decreasing the amount of information to be processed."

New Control Technology

  • The development of bureaucracy and rationalization lead to new information-processing and communication technologies that "served to contain the control crisis of industrial society in what can be treated as three distinct areas of economic activity: production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." (p. 16)

The Information Society

  • Aka, "the production and distribution of knowledge." (p. 21)
  • Included education, research and development, communications media, information machines (computers), and information services (finance, insurance, real estate). (p. 22)
  • Emerged as a response to the 19th century crisis of control. (p. 23).
  • Today, the "continuing proliferation of microprocessing technology exists, with the progressive convergence of all information technologies - mass media, telecommunications, and computing." (p. 25)

[edit] Discussion Questions

  • Think about some of the most important techological inventions throughout history. Is the telegraph one of them? Why or why not? Should it be?
  • What are some of the affordances of the telegraph? What are some of the limitations?
  • What has been lost and/or gained through the impersonal communications that the telegraph has created?
  • How did the standardization and the "to the point" details of information communicated through the telegraph affect newspaper stories and first-hand accounts of situations? Is that still true today?
  • It's amazing how communications through the telegraph created time zones, limited arbitrage, and created a more uniform society. One might say that communications is the key to change. Others might say that technology is the key to change. It's almost the chicken or the egg situation. Do you agree or disagree?
  • At first, many religious groups were upset about the disruption about the "natural order" of life by the time zones. How have religious practices been affected by technology these days, postivitely and negatively, and how might they be affected in the future?
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