1. THE TELEGRAPH
COM 250
February 2, 2016

2. early precursors to the “electric telegraph”
“operating over long distances”
“graph”
“an instrument that transmits information”

3. early precursors to the “electric telegraph”
Typically associated with the first nations – but also used by the ancient greeks & in medieval times, and in lord of the rings
Smoke signals

4. early precursors to the “electric telegraph”
Semaphore
Womens Royal Navy Service – part of larger effort to recruit women into service during WW2 – including factories. History of women as ‘coders’, as an increasilgly useful source of labor for the forms of work required in large communications technology infrastructures from the telegraph to the internet, is going to be a running thread throughout,
Semaphore: Is this a SIGN or a SYMBOL?
What’s it a symbol OF?
Of words – which are themselves SYMBOLS.
How are these limited? By sight!

5. Morse Code The ELECTRIC telegraph was facilitated by two inventions
Electricity: send a current from one destination to another
Morse Code: a system for converting letters (26 distinct sounds & shapes) and numbers (10 distinct values) into combinations of two units (the dot and the dash)

6. signs to symbols to symbols of symbols
Early writing: signs for things in the world
- conservative; constrained to ‘things in the world’
Alphabet: symbols representing sounds made by human physiology, not things
- near-infinite system for making & transmitting meaning
- abstract thought (aka, THEORY: law, philosophy, science)
Morse code: symbols for letters
- dictated by capacities of MACHINE, not HUMANS
- designed for sending messages efficiently; a further abstraction of an already abstract system
“abstraction” – removal from the physical / surrounding world.
Returning – with morse code – to this notion of technology not just in terms of ‘things’ – though Morse’s telegraph machine was certainly an important invention – but the notion of technology as something that re-orders our reality, extends or re-shapes human ability.
“the main development from the 1840s to the 1860s was not technological but physiological”
(K. Hayles, How We Think, p. 127)

7. Carey on the Telegraph…
-Electricity as expanding a new system of knowledge in the world.
-As a communication medium, the telegraph posits “the separation of communication from transportation” (3)
-The Telegraph promoted an ideology that transformed commerce, but also expanded how people that about everyday life- Spiritualism, journalistic prose in that the telegraph promoted a more succinct manner of writing- prose became a commodity to be measured and assessed.

8. -commerce- the telegraph fundamentally changes how the market operates, instances of arbitrage are diminished based on the efficiency of information- supply and demand based on price
“not money against commodities, but time against price”
-the synchronization and coordination of time via the railroad introduces a new temporal consciousness
-How is the telegraph a precursor for digital computation?

9. The telegraph and the Internet
Information as units
Code
Privacy
Kate hayles’ book – “how we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis” – talks about how we co-evolve with machines. How our minds & our sensory organs literally shift in order to accommodate & make use of changes in technology
(What does “Technogenesis” mean?)
-Humans are defined by our evolution along with the technologies. The subject is always shaped by the technologies they use

10. One of her chapters is on telegraphy, but where carey looks at the social, political and economic impacts of the telegraph system, Hayles looks at the perceptual & cognitive impacts.
A parallel here might be comparing Innis, in his look at the social, political & economic impacts of writing technologies with Mcluhan or Walter Ong’s look at the perceptual & cognitive impacts of the alphabet & writing
In particular Hayles looks at telegraph code books
These were long lists of morse code abbreviations for particular phrases – so you’d have codebooks for shipping (like the one shown here), codebooks for military operations, for stock exchanges, etc.
SO you have an entire society communicating over vast distances through a system that essentially breaks down language into elements that can be more easily processed by the technological apparatus (the infrastructure) of telegraphy
And in addition, you have a class / occupation of people whose job it is to learn how to encode & decode messages quickly and accurately – aka, “CODERS”

11. Hayles argues that with this transformation of human communication into machinic units of information -- this “digitization” – you have the foundation for COMPUTATIONAL PROCESSING.
Hayles notes that the work that we program computers to do is essentially the work that telegraphers did, in reverse. Telegraphers translated human communication into machinic code, and from there into pulses of electric current. Computers translate pulses of electric current – the circuit boards in your mobile phones and your computers – into computer code, and from there into human language
And here, Hayles notes a curious paradox in the development of computer code – that is, the more abstraction you have, the more “universal” your language can become. The signs used in early writing systems varied greatly from one region, locality, group of people to another; the alphabet standardized communication, but we still have multiple alphabets; but first morse code, and then binary computer code, represent “the” universal language. Yet at the same time, you need highly specialized skill sets in order to communicate. So with greater universality of communciation, comes, paradoxically, less people capable of fully communicating in these “universal” languages.
But they key point here is that, as Hayles argues, morse code & the proliferation of telegraph code books laid the foundation for “computation” and “computational thinking”.

12. telegraphy & privacy
“for a public accustomed to distance communication in the form of sealed letters, the presumption of privacy often acquired moral force”
(Hayles, p. 133)
Another cognitive & societal impact of telegraphy not mentioned by Carey, but that is important for understanding how the telegraph may have “primed” society for the computer & internet, was with regards to privacy.
Since telegraphy required HUMAN operators to encode & decode messages, that operator – both at the sending & receiving end – “read” the contents of your messages.
So long before Google and Facebook were recording all of our ‘private’ online transactions, we had this system of communication that undermined the notion of “privacy”

13. The iPhone and Mobile Communication
-The iphone as an example of technogenesis via Hayles- it becomes an extension of the self
-patterns and activities of the user over a mobile network are “mirrored back” upon the user
-immersive forms of spatial learning

14. The Singularity is Upon us…
The singularity (Verner Vinge) describes an event in which the machinic will overtake the human capacity to understand…
Will the singularity lead to technological takeover vs. expanded human intelligence?
i.e. mobile technologies give the illusion of more mobility (and our patterns with a network are observed) vs. what an iphone allows a body to do creatively.