Yet, every major aspect of the Internet builds on the strengths of those prior media forms.
Cultural Acceleration
The development of technology has allowed for cultural acceleration, as each media form starting with the telegraph represents an improvement in the speed and/or scope of communication (Carey, 2010). The telegraph separated transportation from communication, which was the first step. The telephone increased speed further, and wireless telegraph set the foundation for later wireless technologies. Radio and television, for example, were based on wireless broadcast, which enabled communications to reach a broader audience. Where the telephone and telegraph introduced an accelerated pace to communications, the impacts of any one given communication were individual. News of the Titanic sinking, for example, was carried through a network of different messages on different media (Carey, 2010). Such large-scale impacts of communication on society became commonplace with radio. Television had yet more potency as a communications medium, the result being further cultural acceleration simply because the images contained in television had more direct impact on the audience.
The Internet represents a convergence of all of these forms, and the result is even greater cultural acceleration. In modern society, information overload can occur (Carey, 2010) because the human body and mind has yet to catch up to the rapid pace of information, which today travels not only at high speed, but also contains the full wealth of content that has been developed over the past hundred-plus years since the separation of transportation and communication began.
For most of the time period since the invention of the telegraph, a significant portion of communication still relied on elements of transportation. Telephones still required wires,...
Modern communication has dispensed with the limits of transportation almost entirely -- mobile devices and high-speed wireless are the norm. Friends in the same room send text messages to one another, indicating a mindset among those who have grown in this world that location is entirely irrelevant now to the choice of communication media. Whereas the media choice was once dependent on location because in-person contact was preferred if available, today that is no longer the case. The separation of transportation and communication is nearly complete today. The implications of this for society -- aside from further cultural acceleration -- can be found by examining the trends that have developed in communication and media beginning at the time when transportation and communication were first separated.
Conclusion
The telegraph remains relevant today because it altered forever the way that humans view communication. No longer was communication constrained by location. Technological advances since the telegraph has each built upon this theme, each advance offering different benefits and resulting in cultural acceleration. The modern-day convergence of these different technologies has resulted in the near total elimination of location from communication, and this promises to accelerate our culture even further. In addition, modern technology has synthesized the role of the audience, returning it from passivity to a more creative role. Not only are we in thrall to media events, we now have the power to create those events for ourselves, becoming participants in the reality that we have created, which moves us to a more comprehensive blurring of reality and media than seen before.
Works Cited:
Carey, J. (2010). Electricity creates the wired world. In possession of the author.
