Notes on the Wire: Telegraphic Opening and Ideology in Modern Afghanistan

Abstract

This article considers the cultural and political force of the telegraph in early twentieth-century Afghanistan where new media technology influenced the social milieu and transformed the sense of contemporary consciousness. I consider how wired and wireless telegraphy were interwoven with Allied imperial aims in the inter-war years and specifically how they became a much-anticipated medium of global connectivity and of ideological anxiety and political sabotage. I argue that at the heart of this tension there was a much deeper ambivalence about the place of ideological and cultural difference in the modern era of technological acquisition and a concomitant anxiety about the task of interpreting that difference.