3 ms·
The Victorian Internet is an interesting and fairly quick read. Check it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
by PakG1 13y ago
The Victorian Internet is an interesting and fairly quick read. Check it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
- Trufa 13y agoHmm... it's an interesting point/perspective (I haven't read the book, just the wiki), but isn't that like saying that the log under something heavy to transport is more significant than the wheel? Maybe you could argue that you couldn't have had the internet without the telegraph but I isn't that the case with every single piece of technology? This leads us to "standing in the shoulders of giants" etc. So my point is, what is the point of making this point, since even if his point is valid/true, they are in different orders of magnitude of how they affected the world. Note that I don't want to dismiss the whole argument without even reading the book, I'm just wondering...
- Thrymr 13y agoThe main argument is that the qualitative difference was in communication at the speed of human transportation (by horse, rail and sea, not yet by air) versus at the speed of light. For the first time in human history, events around the world could be known effectively instantaneously. Everything after that was an increase in the quantity of information.
- Trufa 13y agoSpeed of electricity, not light :) But that's a good way to put it the way you do, it might be more fair to the authors point.
- johnjlocke 13y agoThe telegraph just as disruptive in it's time as the Internet was in the 1990s. Before the telegraph, messages took days, if not weeks to reach cross-country. Every telco since then, (Including the Internet) has been an extension or abstraction of it. Awesome article.