Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph
TL;DR — James Carey’s classic essay on how the telegraph separated communication from transportation and changed how people experienced time and markets.
Carey starts from Henry Adams’s account of the moment New England joined industrial America in May 1844, with the telegraph carrying news of a presidential nomination, and points out how little the telegraph had been studied. The essay argues it was the first technology to separate communication from transportation, with effects on markets, news, language and the sense of time.
What it is: a foundational media-studies essay (first published 1983, collected in Communication as Culture). This copy is from a Georgetown course reading list, via the Wayback Machine.
Where this came from
- r/obscurePDFs post, March 2019 — “The telegraph and its effect on perception of time”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit
- Link as posted: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Carey-TechnologyandIdeology.pdf
21 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.