David Sarnoff, Marconi telegrapher and future President of RCA, in 1908. The Sarnoff Collection, TCNJ.
Give those early innovators their due. It all started with a single wire carrying words coded in simple on-off pulses, hardly more than a long-distance doorbell.
When did we pass over the threshold into what has become the consequential change in the human condition known as the “Information Age?” Many would perhaps place this monumental transition around the 1920s, with the popularity of radio and the early attempts to make “smart machines.” But the real beginnings of our obsession with electronic media began much earlier, with a simpler but demonically influential breakthrough.
The telegraph began as a system of wires and keys that could send text-coded electric pulses over extended distances. Wires on poles spread rapidly throughout the eastern United States in the 1850s. And with this growing network, information began to move at the speed of light rather than the pace of a horse or locomotive. By the civil war era Boston could “talk” to New York or Washington D.C. in real time.
We had entered the age of harnessing electrons for communication, making distance insignificant. The process of shrinking the world had begun. Gradually news came as easily from 300 miles away as from down the street.
Sterling Colorado Railroad Station, 1880s
The change is easy to visualize with two iconic forms of communication usually built side by side. Old images of railroads stretching across mountains and prairies usually include telegraph poles marching along the line. The single wire literally ran through each station along the route, and through the dispatcher’s desk key before exiting the other side of the building. Telegraphy not only made train travel safer, but the thin metal wire also began to carry news from one location to the next at far greater speed. These included accounts of local happenings that were reported in the 19th Century equivalent of a “breaking” story.
We had entered the age of harnessing electrons to make distance immaterial; the process of shrinking the world had begun.
President Lincoln became addicted to telegraphy. Throughout the civil war he spent ours across the street from the White House at the War Office, waiting to hear from his generals in various battle locations which had been wired by the military.
News of Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s Theater spread in the east within hours. But it would take up to ten days for word of the tragedy to reach portions of the country west of the Pony Express origination point in St. Joseph Missouri.
New telegraph lines passing through New England led transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau to note that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The same could be said about phone obsessives today. But that’s another story. The race was on to build news networks to be known as “wire services” that terminated in most city news rooms, providing local papers with much more coverage of events that had occurred in distant cities. To this day The Associated Press still depends on local reporters to feed local stories of potential national interest to their far-flung subscribers.
Fittingly, the most important thoroughfares in some cities carried the name of the new network that was beginning to knit the country together. Telegraph Road is arguably Detroit’s best-known Street, and somehow fitting in a city known for technology and innovation. San Francisco and Berkeley California have their own versions, and do many other towns.
So when you wonder when we became addicts to the effects of charged electrons traveling at the speed of light, give those early 19th Century innovators their due. It all started with a single wire carrying simple on-off pulses, technically little more than a long distance doorbell, but one that would eventually summon us all.
This pattern of misperception is actually so common that if all of us drove cars about as poorly as we listen to others, our roadways would be strewn with wreckage.
We all have had the experience. We are explaining a piece of our world to another, and the other person seems to be listening. But their response indicates that they have mostly missed our point. Instead of a reasonably accurate rendering of our thoughts, their comments reveal that they are projecting what they want to believe about us. For example, you may be talking about the challenges of your job, while a listener–for whatever reasons– may need to hear that you dislike your work. Or you tell them about your first visit to a novel new destination. And the most you can conclude from their response is that they need to hear that the site of the visit is overrated. At the end of such conversations we often walk away puzzled, perhaps concluding that the listener already had a mental map of us that they needed to confirm. This pattern of misperception is actually so common that if all of us drove cars as poorly as we listen to others, our roadways would be strewn with wreckage.
To be sure, we can be unclear or ambiguous. “That’s not what I meant” ranks with “hello” as a well-worn locution. But sometimes the listener has seemingly willed their own preconceptions on to our rhetoric. And it’s interesting to ponder why.
One explanation for this kind of selective perception is that conversation is mostly a process for seeking the familiar. This motive to retain what we already know is sometimes known as “motivated reasoning” or “confirmation bias,” both representing the idea that we have the urge to place incoming information in a familiar map that we have already worked out.
Beyond the obvious economy of reverting to a well-traveled neural pathway, other reasons are possible: Envy? Maybe the guilty comfort that comes with knowing that another person’s life is going less well than our own? And there’s more.
We all construct fantasy themes about others that fill in the unknown gaps of their personal biographies. In communication terms, fantasizing is not a mental health problem, but the natural result of the inductive reasoning we must do to create a more complete picture of another. Psychologists focused on social intelligence sometimes call this “theory of mind,” meaning that humans make estimates of others’ probable mental states based on the circumstantial evidence of prior experience. Add in the projection of the listener’s values onto the details of our life, and it’s easy to understand how we hear responses that can clearly puzzle us. As a general rule, any subject’s actions cannot help but be filtered through the receiver’s perceptions.
Put all of this together and we have an accumulating library of biographies with separate volumes for virtually every relative, friend, coworker and celebrity who is part of our cognitive world. As with any library, one of its rewards is the chance to revisit the familiar.
When things are off base enough you may be tempted to tell an interpreter of your own life that can you can’t recognize yourself from their descriptions. Fair enough. My guess is that we begin to offer a correctives to others by our fifth year. It’s the birthright of every person to freely assert their uniqueness, and sometimes to remind interlocuteurs that they’ve missed the point. Such is the nature of rhetoric that persons who are ostensibly mirroring our ideas may really be saying more about themselves.
President Lincoln became addicted to telegraphy. Throughout the civil war he spent ours across the street from the White House at the War Office, waiting to hear from his generals in various battle locations which had been wired by the military.
