If communication is the backbone of human social identities, values and institutions, dramatic changes in the means of communication have the most profound impacts on social, cultural, economic and political questions. One has only to look back at the sweeping changes brought about by the techniques of long-distance communication since the growth of the electric telegraph in the second half of the 19th century to appreciate how profound the effects of modern communication have been all over the world.

Revolutionary as the means of long-distance communication were to many people of late 19th century, to us their effects may now seem mild as compared to the global impacts of the mass-media technologies and empires that have come into existence during the second half of the 20th century. No king or emperor could dream of wielding even a fraction of the political power that the barons of the mass-media now wield. What is most troubling is that the general populace has little or no capacity to make the mass-media accountable. This situation has only worsened over the past dozen years or so, with the proliferation of satellite television and the rapid growth and consolidation of corporate power in the mass-media.

In the epilogue to her remarkable book, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, first published in 1988, Carolyn Marvin writes that the early electrical technologies - the electric telegraph and the electric light - were central to the new era of "cognitive imperialism", in which "Western civilization was the center of the stage play for which the rest of the world was an awestruck audience."

More recently, Tom Standage, a journalist, has written a most appropriately titled book, The Victorian Internet, in which he has provided an absorbing account of the economic opportunism, militaristic preoccupations and technical rivalry that characterized the period during which the electric telegraph came into being in the mid-19th century. The book also includes a gripping description of the enormous socio-cultural and politico-economic consequences that followed the arrival of the telegraph. The title of the book gives an excellent indication of the importance that Standage attaches to the impacts of the telegraph, and the similarities that he sees with the present phase of technological euphoria. In his words:

The similarities between the telegraph and the Internet - both in their technical underpinnings and their social impact - are striking. But the story of the telegraph contains a deeper lesson. Because of its ability to link distant peoples, the telegraph was the first technology to be seized upon as a panacea. Given its potential to change the world, the telegraph was soon being hailed as a means of solving the world's problems. It failed to do so, of course, but we have been pinning the same hope on other new technologies ever since ... The optimistic claims now being made about the Internet are merely the most recent examples in a tradition of technological utopianism that goes back to the first transatlantic telegraph cables, 150 years ago.

"The optimistic claims now being made about the Internet are merely the most recent examples in a tradition of technological utopianism that goes back to the first transatlantic telegraph cables, 150 years ago."