Rethinking the Development of Telecommunications: The Perspective of Electric Telegraphy

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the 19th century social change in which telecommunications appeared and became a commodity as well as society’s most fundamental organizational tool. Telecommunication in this sense is understood in its original meaning, as coined by Eastunie, when referring to communication over great distances by the use of electricity and electromagnetism. With the introduction of steam power, goods were suddenly moved with a speed exceeding the ability of control mechanisms to contain them. Telegraph networks were first stretched along the growing railroad lines to solve the problems of safety, but soon became an important part of the new control mechanisms. In a competitive environment, at both national and international levels, these control mechanisms shaped themselves according to their efficiency - with the lowest possible amount of transaction cost involved. These efficient control mechanisms came in a shape of centralized hierarchies, which regulated themselves on the principle of a feedback loop, with rationalized information flowing upwards, and adjustments (orders) flowing downwards. The introduction of submarine cables therefore allowed a transition from colonialism to imperialism. When markets in telecommunications failed, and companies resisted the competition by forming cartels and then mergers, Great Britain nationalized its domestic telegraph lines in 1869, and the United States attempted to do so in 1866, but failed. In response to these attempts, Western Union launched what was to become a pattern of the private sector’s public rhetoric of the State as an aggressor entering a domain that was of no legitimate governmental concern. The idea of the state as an enemy, mixed with techno-utopian beliefs in the self organizing potential of the Internet, are central to the contemporary popular culture. Today, when the liberal West has lost its last possible political alternative, the sense of liberation is incorporated in the latest IT commodity.