Death to newspapers?......

As a budding young journalist, the question of whether the Internet will one day superscede traditional print journalism is an important one. But as "The Victorian Internet" shows, it is by no means new. Standage writes of the "earthquake" the telegraph caused in the newspaper business. The second message Morse sent that day in 1844 was, "Have you any news?" With this, the potential of the telegraph to deliver news almost instantly was immediately recognised. Before the telegraph, the business of reporting news was a tediously slow process. Sometimes a war would be over before the papers had even reported its beginnings. Suddenly, the competition to see who could get the news first was over. The winner would no longer be one of the newspapers, but the telegraph. Hence the birth of wire services such as Reuters. Even today, these services are a vital primary source of information for newspapers and broadcasters alike.

With this came a fair amount of doomsaying. It was immediately assumed that the telegraph would drive newspapers out of existence. The only role left for printed publications would be to comment on the news and provide analysis. But, of course, this perception turned out to be wrong. While the telegraph was a very efficient means of delivering news to newspaper offices, it was not suitable for distributing the news to a large number of readers.

The very same is true today. The advent of the Internet brought with it the same doomsaying. Print journalism, it was said, would inevitably be wiped out by its online successors. So far, though, this hasn't happened, and its seems unlikely to happen at all in the near future. The daily newspaper is still the most popular and accessible means of disseminating the news. As yet, computers are neither accessible, nor flexible enough, to undermine the appeal of hardcopy. Nonetheless, the Internet does provide very real potential for a fundamental shift in newsmaking that is unique. Take this 'blogging' business for example. Any literate person with access to a computer can effectively be a 'journalist' ( for a good analysis of blogging as form of journalism, see J.D.'s Web Watch). As was illustrated by Internet gossip maven Matt Drudge, when he exposed the Monica Lewinsky scandal and nearly brought down a President, the ease of self-publishing made possible by the Net offers real potential for a redistribution of power. Could the masses dismantle the monopoly held by media monoliths? Or is this yet another utopian dream? Only time will tell.

To sum up, "The Victorian Internet" is ostensibly a simple, refreshingly direct history. But Standage's carefully chosen anecdotes and elegant summaries always allude to the bigger picture. As they say, what goes around, comes around, and the best way to understand the present, is to look into the past.

Utopian dreams, and realities.....

"What hath God wrought?" So went the first message sent by Samuel Morse on the Washington-Baltimore line on 24 May 1844. Maybe this question had prophetic tidings. After all, the advent of the telegraph would change the nature of human existence for ever after. Time would incremently speed up, and space would irreversibly shrink. So how did Victorian society cope with this profound shift in their world view?

Where "The Victorian Internet" shines is in its descriptions of the cultural responses to the device. From 'on-line' marriages to telegraphic crime and crimestopping; from telegraphic verse, to elite societies of eccentric operators. Standage offers a stream of such cultural incidents, including tales of concerned mothers insisting they send bowls of hot soup down the line to their distant sons! But what has grabbed me the most is a stunning sense of deja vu. The same issues we are grappling with in today's technological climate were as poignant over one hundred years ago. While Standage's reflections on the meaning of events are just in passing, and never intrude on the flow of his narrative, the similarities between the telegraph and the modern net are still obvious.

Jubilant predictions of an end of war have met both inventions. In the nineteenth century, optimists alleged that the telegraph would weaken or abolish boundaries between states, and that communication would no longer be an excuse for conflict. In the same way, the Internet stirred some to argue that an increasingly well-informed, critical society would undermine justifications for war. But history has proven, time and time again, that this is just a utopian dream. As I sit here and write this, New York City is burning, and the world's most progressive and informed nations are on the precipice of a war (of sorts). Has on-line, long distance communication broken down prejudices and misconceptions between the East and West?Hardly.

The story of the telegraph is also a story about globalisation. Far from creating a peaceful, harmonic global village in which colour and creed are no barrier to mutual respect and co-operation, the shrinking of our globe has led to a kind of cultural and economic hegemony, where the line between the haves and have-nots is firmly drawn. As the capitalist fervour of the West encroaches ever more on the world as a whole, those who resist its homogenising force are left by the wayside. So too, the information 'overload' brought about by instantaneous long-distance communication has led to a litany of modern day stresses and syndromes. The speeding up of time means we work longer, harder hours. Our nervous systems are constantly being assaulted with ceasless news and information. As Standage illustrates, the psychological toll wrought by the unstoppable tide of progress is not a new phenomenon. Alongside the obvious positive potential of the telegraph, some commentators could also see in it a potential burden. As one New York businessman said in a speech in 1868:

"There are doubts whether the telegraph has been so good a friend to the merchant as many have supposed....He has to keep up constant intercourse with distant correspondents, knows in a few weeks the result of shipments which a few years ago would not have been known for months....He is thus kept in continual excitement without time for quiet and rest. He must use the telegraph."

It sounds familiar doesn't it?

The power of human endeavour.....

Considering how sophisticated 'online' communication is today, it's quite astounding to read about the telegraph's crude beginnings. The technological trial and error described in "The Victorian Internet" is both fascinating and amusing. Standage traces online communication back to 1746, when two hundred Carthusian monks holding an iron cable were given an electric shock to show the power of electric signals. How far we have come!

Of course, in this so-called information age, it's easy to mock the very efforts that got us here. Looking back on the unabashed simplicity of the first widely used telegraph ( which, incidently, comes from the French word meaning 'far writer'), one is made aware of the profound potential of human endeavour. One man who epitomises this inventive spirit is the 'hero' of the telegraph, Samuel Morse. By no means a man of science, Morse was nonetheless a visionary who had the fervour and determination to make his seemingly far fetched schemes become reality. Morse was not the first man to conjure up dreams of long distance communication, nor did he work alone, but his popular system for the receiving and sending of messages made sure his name became synonomous with telegraphy. In fact, until fairly recently, Morse Code was still used extensively by the military. Today it is used to help profoundly handicapped people communicate, and is, of course still popular among enthusiasts

Indeed, the tecnological description in Standage's work is fascinating. From several tantalising false starts, to the many inventive approaches to long distance communication that appear, then fade, Standage captures the suspense of the whole process. A highlight is certainly the successful completion of the first transatlantic line. Sailing across the Atlantic, spooling cable out into the fickle ocean is both a stunningly crude, yet logical solution to the problem. How else would they have done it? And while technological incompetence had doomed this first connection to imminent failure, the elation and hysteria it provoked indicates just how revolutionary such an achievement was for its time. Suddenly a matter of months months, became a matter of minutes.

So What's It All About...?

"The Victorian Internet" by the Economist's chief science writer Tom Standage, is a very readable chronological tale about the advent of the telegraph, and all the social and political metamorphoses it entailed. Blending fascinating anecdote, science and suspense, Standage illustrates how the modern day Internet is hardly revolutionary when compared to the humble contraptions that preceded it. Before the Internet, before the television, radio and telephone, there was the telegraph, and it annihilated time and distance faster than ever before, and perhaps ever since. Today's world wide web is merely the latest in a long history of 'online' communication, and as Standage's book concludes, the social, political and economic issues ignited by the Internet today are nothing new. Online crime and romance, new ways to do business, technological subcultures with their own customs and vocabulary - these were the same phenomena confronting Victorian society in the nineteenth century. While the telegraph, like the Internet, never lived up to the utopian claims made for it, its implications were far more profound. As Standage writes:

"Time travelling Victorians arriving in the late twentieth century would, no doubt, be unimpressed by the internet. They would surely find space flight and routine intercontinental air travel far more impressive technological achievements....Heavier than air flying machines were, after all, thought by the Victorians to be totally impossible. But as for the Internet....well, they had one of their own."

Welcome to Emma's Tropical Book Bazaar...

Hello there. My name is Emma, and I am 22 years old. Currently I am studing journalism at R.M.I.T. University in Melbourne, Australia. I am a social smoker and drinker with a good sense of humour. I like walks along the beach, dining out, movies and prefer cats. I am down to earth and my star sign is Virgo. Formalities out of the way, what follows is my own, personal review of Tom Standage's little nugget of technological history, "The Victorian Internet." This may seem like an odd thing to do. And, if you ask me it is. I am not some socially inept fanatic who has nothing better to do than sit at a keyboard obsessing over some mildly interesting book on the history of morse code and telegraphy. Sure, Standage's book is a pleasant, informative little read, but hardly inspirational. Certainly not to the extent that a person largely unimpressed by all this internet business ( that's me) would suddenly feel compelled to create a weblog on the subject. When this is done, this blog will be deleted, and chances are, you'll never here from me again.

So why am producing a book review in the form of a weblog? Because I have to. This is one of the more confusing, tedious, time consuming, and largely pointless projects I have had to embark on in the name of a university degree. I apologise for my disdain, but by the time I've finished, I may well have no hair - that's how frustrating this task has been. The assignment brief states that "the blog lends itself to book reviewing," but I am at a loss to see how. It would have made more sense if we each chose an ongoing social or political issue and produced a running commentary on it. From what I can gather, this is what blogging seems to mostly be about.

Oh well, c'est la vie. I will persevere. Although, already I have lost a number of posts somewhere in cyberspace, making this task all the more tiresome. If you hear of some mad woman hurling her computer terminal out into the street, you'll know who and why. By the way, who can I send my phone bill to?