The readings for class today both (as Avery writes) come at the question of the history of telegraphy from two different directions. One (Marvin) emphasizes the people who helped develop telegraphs \u2013 not the rockstars like Morse so much, but the engineers, operators and users who helped send information electroncially over vast distances. The other (Stephenson) focuses on the technology itself, but also emphasizes the incredible contingency of the development of telegraphic lines of communication.<\/p>\n
Avery <\/a>nicely summarized the links between these two pieces when she wrote:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I, however, want to push their historiographical import a bit farther. In her introdction, Marvin writes:<\/p>\n \u201c[according to historians] everything before this artificial moment [the rise of appliances in the 20th<\/sup> century] is classified as technical prehistory, a neutral boundary at which inventors and technicians with no other agenda of much interest assembled equipment that exerted negligible social impact until the rise of network broadcasting.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I wonder what all of you make of her historiographical positioning. Was there a paradigm shift with the introduction of electronic communication? Should we \u2013 as Stephenson does, and Marvin does less \u2013 contextualize modern forms of communication in light of their ancestors?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n By Dr. Shrout The readings for class today both (as Avery writes) come at the question of the history of telegraphy from two different directions. One (Marvin) emphasizes the people who helped develop telegraphs \u2013 not the rockstars like Morse so much, but the engineers, operators and users who helped send information electroncially over vast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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