How the Telegraph Changed the World

I just finished reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  I have written about portions of this text in the past, particularly in an attempt to apply Postman’s ideas to the world of electronic social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

At first, I wanted to give an in depth summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death, but the reality is that this book is so insightful and packed full of quotable material, I know I would end up reproducing the entire text.  Instead, I will try to do a couple of posts on a some of the “big ideas” in the book.  My caution, however, is to not reduce the importance of Postman’s work to the highlights I will give.  This book is an absolute must read.  Because it is of particular importance to me, along the way, I will try to extend his ideas to internet media where possible.

The main crux of Postman’s argument is that forms of communication are inseparable from their content.  This is another way of saying that technology is never value neutral - in the process of communicating information, a particular media also communicates a definition of communication.  While the focus of the text is the television, the first piece of technology under the Postman scrutiny is the telegraph.  With the telegraph, for the first time in human history, the communication of information was not limited by geographical distance:

“The new idea was that transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constrain on the movement of information” (Postman 64).

This, as Postman shows, radically changed public discourse and the way that people came to think of communication in general.  Quoting Henry David Thoreau,

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Main to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough” (quoted in Postman, 65).

The production of communication across vast distances introduced three negative changes in to public discourse: irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.  All three are made possible by the disassociation of content from context that is inherent to telegraphy.  This is what Postman calls “context-free information”:

“[T]he value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.  The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning” (Postman, 65).

Once the partnership between the telegraph and the press was forged, things would never be the same:

“Only four years after Morse opened the nation’s first telegraph line on May 24, 1844, the Associated Press was founded, and news from nowhere, addressed to no one in particular, began to criss-cross the nation.  Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods - much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide’s whooping cough - became the content of what people called ‘the news of the day’” (Postman, 67).

Thoreau, as it turn out, was a bit of a prophet, for telegraphy did make “relevance irrelevant.”

“A man in Main and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about.  The telegraph may have made the country into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other” (Postman, 67).

And here we have our first Facebook/Twitter parallel.  Critics of Facebook criticism will often claim that the medium is good for “keeping in touch.”  There is no doubt that in some sense this is true, but more to the Postman-point, it also radically redefines how we come to understand “keeping in touch.”  Nowhere is the phenomenon of “strangers who know nothing but the most superficial facts about each other” more prevalent than in the world of Facebook and Twitter.  The disconnected, staccato messages and updates that appear are largely irrelevant and superficial.  “Sitting on the couch, reading a good book, and drinking a glass of wine.”  This is not what past cultures would have considered “keeping in touch.”  It is what I have in the past referred to as “romanticizing the ordinary.”  It is not authentic communication of the human person, but is the individual equivalent of slogan-broadcasting; in this way, the human person is actually turned into a commodity for which the new currency is the “Like” button.  The danger here is not the superficiality and limitation of what Facebook and Twitter can communicate, but rather that people have come to think of this irrelevance as “keeping in touch.”

But irrelevance is only the beginning.  The telegraph also issued in an era where information fostered a growing sense of apathy, or impotence.  Here we come to one of the most important concepts in the Postman book: the “information-action ratio.”

“[Y]ou may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on the morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?  For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by change the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know.  But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.  This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance or irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the ‘information-action ratio’” (Postman, 68).

According to Postman, in cultures prior to the telegraph (oral and typographic), information derives its importance from the possibility of action it promotes.

“For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.  You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself ... What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime, and unemployment?” (Postman, 68).

The information glut has come to its full fruition with the advent of the internet, but the personal nature of it rears its ugly head in the world of Facebook and Twitter.  The press (whether we are talking about the telegraph, the television, or the newspaper) has typically been one-sided in its presentation of this gluttony: the press feeds and the consumer consumes.  Facebook has allowed the individual to become the broadcaster, so that there is now a full reciprocation within the individual of consumption-glut and broadcasting-glut.  This has in no way solved the problem of irrelevant and decontextualized information, but instead has made us not only consumers of such information, but also broadcasters.  What’s more, the information-action ratio has reached an all time low, as “status updates” rarely propel one towards any action other than moving on to the next update - what is amazing is how much time is spent skimming through these “updates.”

The telegraph also made information essentially incoherent.  For the first time, information was being presented in small discrete packets, with one replacing the last leaving no time for reflection, analysis, or explanation:

“The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.  In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.  Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas.  It takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgements about their merit, including the form of their presentation.  A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past.  Therefore, civilized people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism.  But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents ... The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages.  Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation” (Postman, 69-70).

The telegraph not only changed the way in which we communicated, but also what we communicated, and in fact communication itself.  It introduced a new “language” or “grammar” to the world, that of abbreviated, disconnected facts that took the form of headlines and slogans more than they did actual useful information.

“Its [the telegraph’s] language was entirely discontinuous.  One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it ... The receiver of the news had to provide meaning if he could.  The sender was under no obligation to do so.  And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph began to be unmanageable, even undecipherable ... ‘Knowing’ the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections.  Telegraphic discourse permitted not time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative.  To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them” (Postman, 70).

Such a presentation of information makes dialog essentially impossible.  True dialog requires knowing about things, not just knowing of them.  Dialog, like books, requires “accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas.”  Discrete, disconnected facts could never serve even as the basis for dialog.  This is precisely why Facebook is not “keeping in touch.”  Understood correctly, “keeping in touch” requires relationship, and relationship is built on dialog and communication.  If the news media-consumer relationship is one-sided in its communication format, then a Facebook conversation is nothing more than two one-sided communications, which is something altogether different than a true two-sided dialog.  It is telling, actually, that the Facebook platform only allows for “Like” and never “Dislike.”  Dialog could never be built on a system that promotes “agree with me or don’t speak.”

In a world of irrelevant, impotent, and incoherent knowledge bits, be they facts about the world obtained through a telegraph or facts about another person obtained through modern social media, at the end of it all, the recipient of this new-found “knowledge” will have actually learned nothing but raw facts, which is to say nothing.  “At best you are left with an amusing bit of trivia, food for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving a crossword puzzle, but nothing more” (Postman, 75).

I will leave you with the following amusing observation, via Postman:

“It may be interesting to note, int this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in American at just the point when the telegraph ... had just achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact.  This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.  The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful ‘Trivial Pursuit.’  In one form or another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, “What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?’  And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?” (Postman 76).

If telegraphed disconnected facts about the world brought about the crossword puzzle, I hate to think what the disconnected bits of personal information in the world of Facebook will bring about.