By generating vast amounts of innocuous information, the telegraph radically changed the “information-based action rate” .
Henry David Thoreau writes in Walden : “We are in a hurry to build a telegraph system from Maine to Texas, but perhaps there is nothing important to transmit from Maine to Texas… We are eager to get through. across the Atlantic and bring the Old World closer to the New World for a few more weeks, but perhaps the first news that will reach Americans then will be that Princess Adelaide has whooping cough.”
The first telegraph system in 1838. (Photo: History.com).
The above statement implies that the telegraph renders information innocuous . The rich flow of information has little to do with, or at all, to the people it is directed to. In other words, information is fundamentally disconnected from the reader’s social background and knowledge.
“Water is everywhere, but there’s not a drop to drink” – Coleridge’s quote becomes a metaphor for an information environment where the element of context is crossed out: In a sea of information, there is very little. valuable information.
A man in Maine and a man in Texas may talk to each other, but there is no topic they both know or are interested in. The telegraph may have made the whole country “a neighborhood”, but these are very peculiar neighborhoods, populated by strangers who know nothing about each other, other than superficial information, frivolous.
Nowadays, we live in such a “neighborhood” (sometimes, people use the word “global village” ), you can understand what is context-free information by giving yourself Ask yourself the following questions: How often does the information you receive on the radio, television or print media in the morning cause you to change your plans for the day or take certain actions that would otherwise have that information, would you not do it? Does the information you are receiving provide detailed data on some of the problems you are trying to solve?
For most of us, weather news sometimes makes such an impact; for investors, they are affected by news about the stock market; perhaps a crime story will also get people to act, if the crime happens to happen near where we live or involves someone we know.
However, most of our daily news is meaningless , just information that gives us something to talk about but doesn’t lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the main legacy of telegraph technology: By generating vast amounts of innocuous information, the telegraph has radically changed the “information-based action rate” .