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By Avery

Marvin and Stephenson both take their readers on journey through the beginnings of telegraphy. The stories launch from separate but complementary facets of the innovation: Marvin launches with people and Stephenson with technology. Together, their stories create a picture of telegraphy that acknowledges the significance of both the wires that transmit information and the people whose culture decides what information is transmitted.

Marvin gives great deference to telegraphy, writing that this “first application of electricity to communication” was “as significant a break with the past as printing before it” (7). She goes on to describe the turf war waged by early electrical engineers eager to legitimize their profession. Marvin demonstrates the ways in which electrical engineers functioned both a subculture defining new territory, and as a manifestation of dominant culture values and norms. My main takeaway: technology does not exist in a vacuum; its possibilities and applications are part of the long arc of human culture.

Stephenson reminds his readers not to forget the physicality of technology. Especially in the age of “wireless” gadgets, it’s easy to forget that there are actual wires and cables that make our online communication possible. He, like Marvin, thinks the computer is not as innovative as the telegraph’s first electrical transmission over great space. And Stephenson’s story ends up in the same place as Marvin’s, joining technology and culture.

Stephenson predicts that the physical challenges to electronic communication will wane as humans (and their computers) get better and better at mapping the terrain and solving problems. Stephenson believes the one problem that will remain, one that has inhibited technological growth throughout history, is the problem of cultural difference. Thus, he writes that “there will always be a niche for people who have gone out and traveled the world and learned a thing or two about its ways.” In other words, technology does not exist in a vacuum; its possibilities and applications are part of the long arc of human culture.

Ultimately, technology is a tool animated by us. (Perhaps that comes into question when we start talking about artificial intelligence, but by all accounts we’re a long way off from that.) At the same time, new technologies can transform the way we interact and the ways we imagine animating new tools. Marvin and Stephenson’s works bring these two fundamentally human aspects, culture and technology, together.