Page 38 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 27

becoming the first really “visual” war through photography, most famously
that of Matthew Brady. We should remember that the linkage between
Brady, photographs, and the war moves in several directions. Photography
allowed the war to be experienced in unprecedented ways, and to achieve a
purchase on the national consciousness in which the pictures themselves
were inscribed. Thus the singularity of this development arose from the
technology, from the historical circumstances, from social practices of
consumption, and from the integration of these dimensions.
The nineteenth century also saw the first exponential advancement in
the speed of communication since the domestication of the horse: the
invention of the telegraph, the first “electric” medium. Before telegraphy,
the swiftest forms of communication were carrier pigeons and semaphores.
The semaphore was fast, but its speed declined with distance. Carrier
pigeons could cover impressive distances very accurately, but could not
carry large volumes of information. Telegraphy involved the kind of
systematic infrastructure that had made the Roman postal system such an
important element of that empire. Rapid communication became depend-
able and – more importantly – public with the development of the Roman
road and postal systems. Telegraphy added incredible advances in speed
and volume to these systems, changing forever the way communities,
nations, and indeed the world thought of itself.
In a feat of engineering that must still stand as one of the great techno-
logical achievements of the modern era, Cyrus Field succeeded in laying a
telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1866. It is hard to imagine the
conceptual change this brought about in worldview among the elites who
could have access to this development – through the near instantaneity of
overseas news in their daily papers, for example. One day, the most
current news from across the ocean is ten days to two weeks old. The next
day, currency is defined in terms of hours – and the limitation is not the
transmission of the raw news; it is in the compiling, editing, and
distributing of it. The difference was even more profound with the comple-
tion of the first cable to Australia in the 1870s. The time gap for London
news shrank from over a month to a few hours, again overnight.
A third major technology of the nineteenth century was the telephone.
Most of us would today probably think of it as the most important of all,
because it is such a ubiquitous part of our lives. It was not a major advance-
ment over the telegraph in terms of speed, but it had great utility in daily life
and daily commerce due to its ease and transparency of use. The fact that it
also seemed – on a prima-facie basis – more “human” (what you heard was
a voice at the other end) was also an important factor. The telephone was
clearly the most “domestic” of these technologies, and became the most
quickly integrated into daily life. It radically reorganized a range of social
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and cultural relations, and forever altered patterns in areas such as dating,
parenting, and the delivery of a variety of commercial and social services.