Part I - Introduction

Summary

At the turn of the twentieth century, american culture was electrified by a revolution in communications technology, with the typewriter, wireless telegraph, telephone, phonograph, cinematographe, and radio appearing within a thirty-five-year span. The typewriter was in production by 1874; the telegraph became wireless in 1896; the telephone generated its own network, reaching from the East Coast to Denver by 1884, becoming fully transcontinental in 1915; the phonograph created a demand for sound recordings which were in mass production by 1893; the cinematographe introduced a new type of entertainment – silent film – in 1895; and the radio made its first broadcast in 1906. As many scholars have noted, the wide-scale implementation of these new communications technologies changed the way Americans experienced distance and time. What has been less discussed, however, is the way these new technologies altered the experience of communication itself. When a pattern of electrical impulses could be sent across the continent and decoded in a matter of seconds, when the grain of the voice could be heard apart from the immediate physical presence of the speaker, when meaningful gestures were presented by bodies removed in both space and time, the messages transmitted through these new technologies must have seemed strange because so unexpectedly distant from the moment of their communicative intent. The act of communication – once experienced as a relatively integrated process – must have felt as if it were suddenly rent apart, splintered into the newly separable elements of bodies, voices, and words.