Compared to the telegraph, the Internet does provide a spectacularly enhanced degree of speed. However, many of the claims for the revolutionary consequences of the Internet presume a putatively diferent past, and a belief that our current ambivalence toward technological change has no precedent. For example, the emergence of global space is not as new as we think. The telegraph also promised to annihilate time and space and to bind all of mankind together “on the face of the globe.” In the words of the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in 1899, the telegraph “has, as it were, assembled all mankind upon one great plane, where they can see everything that is done and hear everything that is said, and judge of every policy that is pursued at the very moment those events take place.”21 Likewise, the consequences of this for the very nature of language, knowledge, and human awareness led to both the kind of euphoric claims and accusations of trivialization that bear an uncanny resemblance to discussions about Twitter.
The telegraph had a profound impact on the conduct of commerce, government, the military, and colonialism, dramatically altering the ways in which time and space were understood by ordinary men and women. The telegraph’s role in establishing standard “railway” time is well known. The eventual adoption of Greenwich Mean Time brought the world within one grid of time, uprooting older, local ways of marking the passage of time. Similarly, standard units of distance and territorial measurement incorporated space into a single regime of measurement.
It is precisely these transformations that Anthony Giddens famously situates at the heart of the constitution of modernity. The new systems of calibration provide the means for “precise temporal and spatial zoning” and thereby produce new topographies and chronologies of experience, new divisions between public and private space, work and home, labor and leisure, employment and retirement.22 In other words, the very dynamism of modernity “derives from the separation of time and space and their recombination.” The result is a fundamentally changed consciousness of temporality in social and cultural life.
Time and Motion
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