15,697
edits
Changes
no edit summary
In <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067462212X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=067462212X&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=442704e8ea61d8459f5ce027a668a0c4 News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897]</i> published by the Harvard University Press, Menahem Blondheim sees argues that the telegraph as was a key moment in the change from an "age of transportation" to an "age of electric communication." He quotes an 1847 poem to highlight the change, with rhapsodizing over "the sleepless heralds [who] run along the smooth and slender wires." Clearly, an earlier idea of communication as a messenger traveling across space has survived in the emerging nineteenth century ways of understanding "instant" transmission. The possibility that information could be transmitted immediately to multiple points seemed wondrous to people of the time, as if it were a force of nature, like the rays of the sun. The telegraph could allow details of life and death importance to be conveyed much more quickly, and its utility to the financial industry (e.g. verifying checks against existing accounts, developing networks) was obvious. The 1840s and 50s saw a reduction in price differences between different regional markets, as information about goods could become more widely shared by people geographically separated. Some noted the potentially adverse effect of the telegraph on state sovereignties and local authority, as people's access to information grows more uniform and sources become more centralized. Blondheim is particularly interested in the role of the Associated Press, first as an oligopoly (the New York AP and the Western AP) and then as a monopoly of information when two competitors joined forces.
Blondheim is careful to note that the telegraph only improved upon rapid and recent gains in the speed of information. Between 1790 and 1817 the time it took for messages to reach Boston from Washington went from 18 to 6.2 days, and by 1841 it took only 2.8 days. All this without the telegraph. The author says that the new device only improved the speed by a day or two, but that is also supposing that the news travels between two major cities with significant transportation infrastructure. At the start of the nineteenth century, there was actually a dearth of news, since the population was small, scattered, and locally focused, and even the party papers had not gotten fully started yet. Blondheim describes this period as the 'discovery of timeliness,' as instant transmission meant getting the scoop on a story was more important than ever. He quotes James Carey: "when information moves at unequal rates of speed, what is already the past for the privileged is still the future for the deprived." Using the mail system privileged private correspondence over the cumbersome process of editing and printing a publication, thus favoring insiders; so newspapers invested in costly pony and locomotive expresses to get the edge of new information, allowing the public sphere could compete with the private in terms of speed. By the time these accomplishments had been made, the telegraph came along (1844) to nullify their significance.
