Essay by Nick Carr: “…The construction of telecommunication networks required enormous capital and extensive managerial coordination. In the United States, media became big business, as the rise of Western Union signified. To inventors, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives, the public’s celebration of communication proved a boon. Not only did it reinforce their messianic sense of self-importance; it served their business interests. It guaranteed them eager customers, enthusiastic investors, and indulgent regulators. As the pace of technological progress quickened, each advance in media systems triggered a new burst of millenarian rhetoric. Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his plan to create a wireless telegraph, said that he would be “remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” Not to be outdone, his rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that his invention of radio would “make war impossible.”
Such cheery predictions were put to an early test in the summer of 1914. In the immediate aftermath of the June 28 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through recently strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern has described, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. Rather than calming the crisis, they inflamed it. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.” Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication. By August, World War I was under way…(More)”.
