Notes MCiT 2023
Week 2 – Connecting the World: Industrialization, Standardization, Abstraction
Key historical transformation: Connecting the World … in the 19th century.
Agrarian -> industrial society
- Capitalism: factories, division of labor
- Scientific invention
- Energy/Power: natural source -> steam, electricity
Independent of nature: an illusion
- Networked, urban life: infrastructures.
More and more people lived in cities.
Key historical transformation: telegraphy / railroad
- Acceleration
- Networked society
Relations between media transformations and larger socio-cultural developments:
- communication and mobility
- modernity
- industrialization
Conceptualize media transformation more generally: Standardization; abstraction.
1800-1900, Europe: the “long 19th century”: French Revolution 1789 – WW1 1914
Modernity as (European) Periodization
Early Modern Period ca. 1500-1800 CE
(Enlightenment) Older and longer process, a set of ideas
- media: printing press
enabled Enlightenment
- culture: renaissance / reformation
- knowledge: experimental science
- economy: colonialism / slave trade
Modernity ca. 1800-1970s CE
Techniques and science, open future, rational and progressive
- secularization, enlightenment
- technology shaping / improving future.
- nation states, democracies, imperialism
- industrialization, railroad, telegraphy
Modernity as (European) Self-Perception
Supremacy: rationality, universality; progress, civilization
,Concerns: loss of tradition, disenchantment, bureaucratized life, stress
Railroad and Telegraphy
Before Railroad
- “Silk Road” route, ca. 150 BCE – 1450 CE
- Transatlantic slave trade, 1600s – early 1800s
Emergence of Railroad Networks
- 1770s: steam engine in many industries
Replacing human powers, creating factories that workers went to.
- 1800: invention of steam locomotive
- 1830s: scheduled, inter-city passenger trains.
Standardization
- Tracks: efficient but inflexible system
Capital intensive.
Gauge
Morse code
Stations
‘Path dependency’
- National / international systems
Abstraction
- Tracks even out topography
- Regular speed without sense of exhaustion
- ‘Panoramic view’: passive, distanced experience of landscape passing by
Telecommunication: dematerialized information, telegraphy separates communication from
transport. (Motif of 19th century: Communication became faster than Transport.)
Electrical Telegraphy
- 1830s: cable networks in the US, UK and Germany
- 1866: transatlantic cable: global immediacy
Standardization
- Electricity, cables, codes: immediacy; expertise/institutions
- Penetrating all aspect of life: new styles of communication; new forms of journalism; news
agencies; creating global markets
Abstraction
- Impacting social hierarchies: Crimean War (1850s)
Railroad and Telegraphy – Common Features
- Complex technical systems that require standardization
- Require new forms of financing and management.
- Become essential systems for many organizations and practices.
- Resulting challenges: national vs. international; state vs. private enterprises
Railroad and Telegraphy – Interrelations
, - Media (as part of) ‘constellations’
How other media impact how we experience this one medium.
Replacing Causality.
- ‘Path dependency’
- Granting each other plausibility: e.g., safety (telegraph -> railroad; wireless telegraph ->
shipping)
- Creating a networked world
Reading Osterhammel
Standardization/Abstraction of Time and Space
Reading Schivelbusch
Schivelbusch distinguishes a more traditional “consciousness” or “perception” from a modern one
that is shaped by trains, cities, photography and other new developments. What characterizes this
“modern consciousness” and how does the railroad contribute to that?
Modern Consciousness / Perception
- General impact of train on perception:
Straight lines between points, origin-destination (‘abstraction’)
Geographical, mathematical, disconnected.
(vs synesthetic, immersive, intense relationship with environment)
- Examples
“The railroad as the essential agent of the transformation of landscape into geographical space”
“The railway puts an end to this intensity of travel.”
“The speed and mathematical directness with which the railroad proceeds through the terrain
destroy the close relationship between the traveler and the traveled space.”
- Specific modern perception (in relation other developments, like urban life)
Quantitative increase of impressions
Distance / disconnection, flatness, overview
Panoramic view; mastery
Imagination of Modernity
- Global synchronicity around 1870
- People who never used telegraph imagined themselves participating in a telegraphic
future (telegraph as symbol of Modernity)
Telephony
- 1870s: emergence
- 1890s-1950s: cultural embedding
Wireless Telegraph
- 1900: emergence
- Electromagnetic waves: through the air (instead of cable); ‘covering’ space instead of
point-to-point.
- Navigation / emergency calls for ship.
- Precondition for radio / TV broadcasting
