alt Hacker NewsFor examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
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PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News".
https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/
Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.
https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use.
The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):
https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the...
Here is a non-referral link to the same product page:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR
The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest:
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
Two other good books are
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
I read that book. It is indeed a wonderful history, especially for people who think digital communications are something new :-)
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too.
Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).
In my region 'local' (half province level) newspapers are the most read by a huge margin.
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..