We saw the technology emerge from the vision

Globe & Mail journalists, June 1944. City of Toronto Archives. Public Domain.

Preface to Revolutions
in Communication 

Working in newsrooms late into the evening hours, my colleagues and I would sip coffee and sift through stacks of news reports and wire service photos from all over the world.

Occasionally, as Atlanta editor Ralph McGill once said, we’d get a sense of the earth wheeling again toward the sun, alive with joys and struggling with sorrows—and all reflected in hundreds of laser photos and wire service stories that could not possibly fit into tomorrow’s daily newspaper.

We lived through the last days of hot lead typesetting, chattering Associated Press teletypes, and Western Union telegrams. We fiddled with the first word processors and struggled with the first modems. We saw the mass media for what it was and what it was meant to be.

In many ways, we were glad that it was the end of an era.

We were all too aware of the media’s constraints in the late twentieth century, and we wondered how things would look on the other side of the digital revolution that we all knew was coming. We figured that, as with any revolution, there would be corrosive as well as ennobling impacts. And that was right.

What we did not expect, and what made the digital revolution so interesting, was that it did not spring from the media institutions, large computer companies, and defense industries. Instead, to paraphrase John Adams, we saw the digital revolution first taking place in the hearts and minds of a global community of journalists, scientists, engineers, writers, philosophers, artists, and visionaries. We saw the technology emerge from the vision.

Trying to make sense of this, historians are finding that a similar sense of community animated most of the great communications revolutions in history. Gutenberg’s printing press spread rapidly across Europe in the 1400s thanks to a
community of craftsmen; Daguerre literally gave away photographic patents in 1839 and created a world community of photographers almost overnight; and Morse Code became the first universal software in the 1840s, and inspired the first international communications organization, although Morse’s telegraphic patents ended up in the hands of a monopoly. Even so, a community of critics who fought the telegraph monopoly funded Alexander Graham Bell’s work to create the telephone, and the global community of scientists investigating electromagnetic phenomena were the ones who created radio, television, and satellite communications.

Nearly every communications revolution is an attempt to circumvent a previous communications bottleneck, and that sparks social change. Every revolution has its media, and every new medium spins off its own revolution.

The benefits of all these communication revolutions are well known to those of us living in the early twenty-first century. But revolutions come with unexpected costs. Printing advanced freedom of thought but also accelerated centuries of religious and political struggle; visual communication deepened human empathy, but diluted, and (some say) degraded, public discourse; electronic communication energized the world’s nervous system, but in the process submerged unique cultures and put nationalism on steroids; and now the digital revolution seems to be undermining the literate cultures that were created by the printing press while pulling the world closer together in unpredictable and often uncomfortable ways.

A copy desk at the NY Times in 1942. Despite the lack of desktop computers, it looks a lot like the ones where the author worked at the Associated Press, the Charleston SC Courier and Baltimore MD Sun in the 1980s and 90s.  (Library of Congress).

To understand these interesting times, a sense of history is a basic requirement. Without history, we are blind and powerless. With history, at the very least we are not blind, and occasionally we may perceive an opening for a real contribution to our common destiny.

Bill Kovarik, PhD.
Floyd, Virginia, US