technologies confused policymakers, preventing them from taking the right steps to make good on those early promises of progress.
By touting the uniqueness of the Internet most technology gurus reveal their own historical ignorance, for the rhetoric that accompanied predictions about earlier technologies was usually every bit as sublime as today’s quasi-religious discourse about the power of the Internet. Even a cursory look at the history of technology reveals just how quickly public opinion could move from professing an uncritical admiration of certain technologies to eagerly bashing everything they stand for. But acknowledging that criticism of technology is as old as its worship should not lead policymakers to conclude that attempts to minimize the adverse effects of technology on society (and vice versa) are futile. Instead, policymakers need to acquaint themselves with the history of technology so as to judge when the overhyped claims about technology’s potential may need some more scrutiny—if only to ensure that at least half of them get realized.
And history does contain plenty of interesting lessons. The telegraph was the first technology predicted to transform the world into a global village. An 1858 editorial in New Englander proclaimed: “The telegraph binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth.... It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.” Speaking in 1868, Edward Thornton, the British ambassador to the United States, hailed the telegraph as “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.” The Bulletin of the American Geographical and Statistical Society believed it to be an “extension of knowledge, civilization and truth” that catered to “the highest and dearest interest of the human race.” Before long the public saw the telegraph’s downside. Those who hailed its power to help find fugitive criminals soon had to concede that it could also be used to spread false alarms and used by the criminals themselves. Perhaps it was a sense of bitter disappointment that prompted the Charleston Courier to conclude, just two years after the first American telegraph lines were successfully installed, that “the sooner the [telegraph] posts are taken down the better,” while the New Orleans Commercial Times expressed its “most fervent wish that the telegraph may never approach us any nearer than it is at present.”
The brevity of the telegraph’s messages didn’t sit well with many literary intellectuals either; it may have opened access to more sources of information, but it also made public discourse much shallower. More than a century before similar charges would be filled against Twitter, the cultural elites of Victorian Britain were getting concerned about the trivialization of public discourse under an avalanche of fast news and “snippets.” In 1889, the Spectator, one of the empire’s finest publications, chided the telegraph for causing “a vast diffusion of what is called ‘news,’ the recording of every event, and especially of every crime, everywhere without perceptible interval of time. The constant diffusion of statements in snippets ... must in the end, one would think, deteriorate the intelligence of all to whom the telegraph appeal.”
The global village that the telegraph built was not without its flaws and exploitations. At least one contemporary observer of Britain’s colonial expansion into India observed that “the unity of feeling and of action which constitutes imperialism would scarcely have been possible without the telegraph.” Thomas Misa, a historian of technology at the University of Minnesota, notes that “telegraph lines were so important for imperial communication that in India they were built in advance of railway lines.” Many other technological innovations beyond the telegraph contributed to this expansionism. Utopian accounts of technology’s liberating role in human history rarely acknowledge the fact that it was the discovery of quinine, which helped to fight malaria, reducing the risk of endemic tropical disease, that eliminated one major barrier to colonialism, or that the invention of printing helped to forge a common Spanish identity and pushed the Spaniards to colonize Latin America.
When the telegraph failed to produce the desired social effects, everyone’s attention turned to the airplane. Joseph Corn describes the collective exaltation that surrounded the advent of the airplane in his 2002 book The Winged Gospel. According to Corn, in the 1920s and much of the 1930s most people “expected the airplane to foster democracy, equality, and freedom, to improve public taste and spread culture, to purge the world