From Island Communities to a Networked Society

In 1874, Milwaukee newspaper editor Col. Elias A. Calkins complained about the public demand for telegraphed news:

The telegraphic dispatches must be published. . . . People read them eagerly, whether they are important or not. . . . Not half the stuff which comes by telegraph would be printed in our columns if it came by any other mode of conveyance. But there is a public voracity for telegraphic news which will not be appeased. . . . This appetite grows on what it feeds on, like a novel-reading appetite in the young, or a whisky or opium appetite in the old. . . . This feature is constantly expanding in dimensions. It grows like an excrescence upon journalism. We are helpless to resist it.¹

Thanks to advances in communication and transportation technologies, the world shrank considerably for most Americans in the late nineteenth century. The period invites comparison to our own era of interconnectedness. Contemporaries often waxed eloquent about the “annihilation of space.” The global telegraph network placed the world's news onto newspaper pages within a day or two. Global shipping and rail networks gave U.S. consumers unprecedented access to exotic goods like canned Hawaiian pineapple. British historian Christopher Alan Bayley called the era “the great acceleration,” a period of intensifying global connections. Rebecca Edwards has described this era as fostering an expanded “reach”—the heightened circulation of goods, people, information, culture, and capital.²

Because of the work of a couple of generations of historians, we have a solid understanding of how these processes transformed social relations, politics, and economic activity during the nineteenth century. For example, thanks to Roland Wenzlhuemer's recent book on telegraphy and globalization, we know how communication networks shaped global trade and information circuits.³ However, we understand far less about what Colonel Calkins complained about—the relationship between technological change and psychology. Both books reviewed here are different in subject, scope, and intended audience. Yet they both grapple with the issue of how new technological possibilities affected individual perceptions, expectations, and behavior.

Many an excellent work of history has started out with a deceptively simple question. John A. Britton's research into the impact of telegraph cables on international crises began by wondering how Carleton Beals, a reporter for The Nation, telegraphed his interviews with Nicaraguan rebel Augusto Sandino to New York in 1928. Britton's work to answer this question points out the advantages of being an outsider. It is likely that a historian of technology (like me) would not have even asked the question. After all, by 1928 the landline and cable telegraph network spanned the globe. An American could send a telegram to virtually any inhabited place on the map, merely by picking up a telephone and dictating a message to the nearest Western Union office. Similarly, by 1928 it was easy to send a telegram from Nicaragua to New York, provided one could afford the tariff. Cable telegraphy, in short, had been a mature technology for decades.

I am glad that Britton posed the question, though. His search for an answer took him to the Library of Congress, National Archives, and the Cable and Wireless Archive in Cornwall, England. The result is an impressively researched book that investigates the connections between rapid and global electrical communication, diplomacy, journalism, and the formation of public opinion. Britton builds on and significantly enriches the prior work of David Paull Nickles on the telegraph's effect on diplomacy and of Menahem Blondheim's on telegraphic newsgathering.⁴

Britton argues that “the use and misuse” of the global telegraph network interacted with “the mass-circulation press” (p. 3) of the late nineteenth century to make public opinion an increasingly important factor in diplomacy...