mcom3190

It’s difficult for me to imagine a time in which communication was limited by time, space and distance. With the invention of the telegraph, communication suddenly seemed limitless – within 20 years of the first telegraph line, lines were being installed under the ocean, a feat of communication which had never before been achieved. Like the printing press, the telegraph revolutionized the mass media; now not only could news be printed and distributed to readers, it could also be reported across the nation and the world. The telegraph, in its ability to connect people across long distances, was essentially the internet of the Victorian era. Not only were people able to connect socially over a great distance but business was also able to be conducted between states
It is mind blowing to think that less than 200 years ago the telegraph was the best way to communicate over distance. The History Channel deemed the telegraph as the “catalyst of the communication renaissance” that triggered an outburst of technological growth that is still exponentially expanding. Much in the way the telegraph changed the news media, so too has the internet altered our media landscape. Even the way information is transmitted is similar between the telegraph and the internet: the telegraph in dots and dashes, the internet in 0,1 binary code. Though the machinery is different, the impact is also very similar. Transmission of information by telegraph changed many aspects of people’s lives just as we now find ourselves unable to live without the internet. The telegraph was really the start of social networking and as technology has evolved so has our need to be connected to more and more people. At the invention of the telegraph I imagine it was hard for people to believe technology more advanced would come along, but soon came the telephone and within 100 years computers. It is hard to fathom what will replace the internet our mode of connection to the world.