[REVIEW] Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet

[rfmcdonald]

Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet, a historical survey of the telegraph from its origins in the optical telegraph of Revolutionary France to the beginning of its eclipse by the telephone in the 1880s, makes a superficially convincing argument that the telegraph fostered a tight-knit culture among mid-19th century telegraphists comparable to contemporary Internet culture. Before the invention of the teleprinter, telegraph operators did constitute a highly-skilled class of information workers with sufficient leisure time as workers to develop a geographically dispersed culture, online relationships resulting in everything from stock market fraud to marriages. Though Standage's analogy stumbles in that telegraph operators always formed a rather smaller minority of the general population than Internet users even in the late 1990s, used critically it does help the reader get a grasp on the way that instantaneous global communications transformed the 19th century world. It's always comforting, somehow, to find out that the new in fact has a tradition somewhere.