have you ever wondered how you would communicate without electricity I know it might sound like a kind of simple question but really entertain it with me for a second I I I promise it's kind of fun you know no cell phones no internet no landline no radio waves not a single wire no volts allowed how would you get in touch with the people that you care about what would you do I've posed this question to a few friends and family recently and almost all of them found it unimaginable I'd watch them all kind of think it through for a second and realize how much they rely upon electrical devices to send messages and stay in touch with the people that they talk to every day and then all just kind of shrug their shoulders and go I don't know I guess I'd send a letter and to be clear I don't think that this is just some lack of imagination on their part I think there's actually a real difficulty to this question and I think the source of that difficulty comes from the fact that most of our histories of communication are really just glorified histories of electricity when telling the story of the mass media writers will give an obligatory nod to the written word and the printing press before in variably jumping to the telegraph the telephone the radio you know the real meat of the matter when the mass media really took off but I've been obsessed recently with the tiny bit that everyone skips over in the middle there the part after the printing press but before electricity as it turns out there's a lot of really creative signaling devices from that narrow slice of history that can teach us a lot about the way we communicate today this video is about them and why I found them so fascinating in the last few months we're going to start in part one with some context as to how I ended up getting obsessed with this small bit of History before moving on to part two where I'll show you some model signaling devices from this era that I built in my apartment then in part three I'll tell you about what I think this all has to say about how we analyze media today please enjoy the video at your leisure my obsession began when I realized that AI doesn't understand the word media like you or I do recently my partner introduced me to a game called contexto it's an online daily secret word game kind of like you can guess pretty much any word by typing it in the little box here and the game will give you a number and color that tell you how close the word you guessed was contextually to the secret word of the day red words are further away orange words are a little closer and green words are the closest the top 300 most contextually similar to today's secret word you continue to guess words getting closer and closer until eventually you figure out what the secret word is and when the ranking is done by an AI the website describes in the following way the game uses an artificial intelligence algorithm and thousands of texts to calculate the similarity of the words in relation to the word of the day not necessarily it is related to the meaning of the words but to the proximity in which they are used on the internet so for example one day recently the word was lemonade and some of the most contextually similar words were words like soda and juice and strawberry um I think this is probably because the AI found these words next to Lemonade in a bunch of of online restaurant menus and so learned that they are contextually similar they appear together this is part of the joy of the game trying to figure out what the AI thinks of different words and where it's learning that from it gives a new perspective on otherwise really common everyday words because the game has to be prepared for any entry from players though there are some content moderation filters for example words like drug and organ aren't permitted for fear of euphemism it seems you also can't enter words like and or and but because they appear so commonly that the contextual ranking system doesn't really make sense with words like them also you can't enter different forms of the same word you can't say like tree and trees the game will just tell you that you've already guessed that word before and it's this feature the fact that you can't enter plurals that led to a mini Epiphany for me one day I entered the word media and contexto told me that the word medium had already been guessed now this wasn't an error I had already guessed the word medium and media is the plural of medium you know one medium many media but today we don't really consider these two words to be contextually equivalent and it really caught my attention that the game thought that they were today the media is most commonly used to refer to an institution you know some amalgamation of print and broadcast entities that you can tiate against um I'm being silenced by the media I don't know if we're going to keep that one but that wasn't always how the term the media was used in his 1935 essay molding public opinion Edward bernes gives an example of the original or kind of more literal meaning of the media we come to the fourth factor which the propagandist must keep in mind at all times the media by which his facts and his point of view reach his public renees is considered today to be the father of public relations he wrote a bunch of seminal texts on public opinion and propaganda and mass communication and he developed what we would consider today to be the first public relations campaigns he was really obsessed with influencing the things that people F this sometimes led to more positive things like advocating for labor rights education but other times led to not so great things like trying to convince women they should smoke in public we all make mistakes Edward Rene's obsession with mass manipulation led him to hold the media in really high regard but when he said the media he didn't mean new news rooms or Publishers or some secret cabal influencing the world he meant the actual channels by which information was reaching the public you know this medium and that Medium the media and I know he meant it this way because right after that quote I just read you he starts listing the quantities of different Publications and communication devices um circulation of daily newspapers US and Canada 38 million radio sets us ,500,000 telephones 16,800 ,000 seating capacity in Motion Picture houses United States 11, 300,000 he literally meant that the most effective public Communications campaigns would be those that used all available channels to reach Their audience I think if bernes were alive today he may realize that the media have become kind of uncountable you know what would he really gain from knowing that there are billions of posts on social media other than the same existential dread that we all have I think instead a much more fun thing to do is to imagine what his exercise looks like before his time before the 1930s when were there enough diverse communication channels to begin referring to them as the media and when were they influential enough for early theorists like bernes to see them as a source of political and Social Power leading to the media in short I needed to find out when the media were created so I consulted this book the creation of the media by Paul star we'll talk about it a lot more in section three but for now uh you should know that I consulted it because it's really thorough and talks about the creation of both the media and the media this book is actually what turned my idle questions into something of an obsession in this book on pages 156 and 157 I learned one of the most challenging pieces of media history that I have learned in a very long time you see I've been taught in my communication studies degree that there was an identifiable moment in the 19th century when the nature of mass media really changed the invention of the telegraph which supercharged press institutions with electrical speed bringing news everywhere instantly and turning the media into the media I had learned that the instantaneous totalizing effect of electric media marked a before and an after a Gutenberg moment in which the nature of humanity became the nature of electricity the medium didn't exist and then it did and everything was different after but then thanks to Paul star I learned that the first telegraphs had no wires and everything changed the origins of the telegraph in Europe lay with concerns of State the concept of the telegraph indeed the word itself which means distant writer came from a signaling system developed in Revolutionary France and adopted primarily for military purposes conceived by claw Chap and first put into operation between Paris and Lil in 1794 the optical semore Telegram enabled operators stationed on a line of towers to send and relay messages by varying the positions of a large rotating bar with rotating arms for thousands of years humans have wanted to tell each other what they're up to from very far away for almost all of known human history this problem was very difficult to solve eventually this desire would lead to the invention of the first Telegraph Network the chap system in France but we've got a little bit of a ways to go before we get there I want to start by sharing with you all a history of early communication devices as laid out best in this book the early history of data networks by Holtzman and person it's the best book I could find on the history of non-electrical telegraphs go figure there aren't that many of them to the credit of humans our ideas have gotten better with time but they started out pretty [ __ ] as Holzman in person start the story a fairly obvious method to communicate is of course to hire somebody to deliver a message as fast as possible this idea of the running messenger is what leads to stories like that of fides the famous runner who went from Marathon to Athens inspiring the name of the modern Marathon this system is only really as good as your fastest runner can run though so people immediately started making Innovations on it like relay systems in Babylon guard posts were placed along roads where Messengers would pass messages on between each other meaning the messages moved faster because the runners were less tired and from there people realized that you could do the same thing with the relay but put the messengers on horses who are notably a lot better at running than humans we have historical record from Marco Polo for example that describes one such horse relay system orchestrated by Kuan and this was also the idea behind the infamous Pony Express but even in a relay and even with the aid of horses a letter can only move so quickly there were some later ideas to try and get messages to move even faster like messenger pigeons but you know they were all still too slow even today getting a physical letter somewhere quickly is kind of hard and ancient people also were aware of this limitation so they tried to come up with ways to communicate that didn't involve sending a letter they realized that from these guard posts that they'd built along the roads they were able to see a fire at the next post so they started equipping all the posts with fire signals which could be used to communicate extreme urgency and distress fire signals show up everywhere throughout ancient history they're mentioned in Agamemnon and the Bible and in the writings of Julius Caesar similarly smoke signals were used in ancient China and by native nor Americans who would use their position in the landscape to communicate different messages other incomplete signaling systems that showed up in this era included shining the sun off of a reflective surface like a shield flag waving or even shouting through a really big tube which I'm personally really fond of additionally there are drums which were used by European armies as well as in South America and Africa we'll talk about those more in section three most signaling systems had a key failure though they were faster than sending a letter yes but they lacked richness richness is a term used to describe the informational and contextual density of a particular communication medium for example today we might say that there are lean communication mediums like email which struggle to convey tone and intent due to technical limitations and we might also say that there are rich communication mediums like video or face-to-face conversation in which informational density is augmented by available cues like pitch and tone and expression early signaling methods like fire signals though were about as lean of communication systems as you can have the signal can be on or it can be off the fire lit or not lit and what it actually means is kind of hard to tell are there Invaders a flood should we send food building materials soldiers it's hard to say and letters though still lean by today's standards are much richer than these early signaling systems they could convey instructions requests anything that another literate person could interpret remember though that they are much slower than the signaling systems so the quest began in many places all over the world to combine the richness of letters with the speed of signaling systems which leads us to the first telegraphs kind of at this point I'm going to show you four early telecommunications devices I wouldn't call them all telegraphs necessarily in that some of them are incomplete signaling systems but they certainly all get a lot closer than signals did the first advice I want to tell you about is what some sources refer to as the hydraulic Telegraph although this certainly falls in the category of devices that I don't think are quite a telegraph yet it was invented by a man named anas in about 350 BC to send messages between cisy and Carthage and it was documented thanks to the historian pbus who will come up again in a second the basic idea is that any two locations that wanted to send a message to each other would have identical vessels that were filled with water in Real History these would would have been large clay pots but I'm using smaller vessels here so that I don't get water everywhere in my apartment I hope that you'll forgive me the vessels are synchronized in three key ways first off they start with the same amount of water stored inside them measured out at each location second they have an identical hole through which the water leaves at the same rate this means that the level of water in the two containers decreases at the same rate when the plugs are removed and third they have an identical set of markings that correspond to the level of water you'll see on these we have orange followed by Pink followed by Green followed by Blue two parties that wanted to send a message to each other with this device could use a more primitive form of signaling like torches or horns to Signal when they should start and stop the flow of water since the water flows out at the same rate and we started with the same amount of water it stands to reason that if we can coordinate the start and stop of the flow well enough we can encode more signals than we used to be able to as we can use the level of the water to encode information for example we might start with a torch signal that tells us to unstop the bottles and begin the flow of water we would then wait until a second signal appears telling us to stop the flow of water at that point we would check the level of water in the containers which if everything is calibrated correctly should be the same as our Pier across on the opposite Tower we might for example stop at the level of green which means ship's approaching or at the level of pink which means uh sen Fu there has been a flood you'll notice as well that these are certainly richer as a communication medium than a simple fire signal we can encode four messages here whereas a fire signal can only reasonably do one but there's still not that great a larger vessel may allow us more than four encodings but there is still some upper limit on the amount of messages that we can reasonably communicate without fear of error it's a step in the right direction certainly but it does doesn't give us the same Freedom or richness of communication that a letter or modern-day communication devices might so to address some of the limitations of the hydraulic Telegraph we may use a device like the one you see here two sets of five torches coordinated by something called a polius square this would have been used somewhere between 200 and 120 BC first created by two men named CLE oxis and Demus and perfected and documented by the historian pbus this one works by using the two sets of five torches represented here with birthday candles to identify the column and row of letters in a 5x5 grid the actual square of the pus Square by lighting say four torches on the left and one torch on the right we can create an ordered pair that allows us to identify the letter D fourth column first row this is a huge step up from the hydraulic Telegraph and not just because we're no longer spilling water everywhere using this system I can spell out any signal that I may want to which means we're not just bound to a set of four encodings for example we can spell out any message that we know how to write there's also another subtler more exciting Innovation with this one that Holzman and person point out you may know that the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters which means that one encoding in our 5x5 grid is blank instead of just ignoring this though there is evidence that this was actually used as a control code one torch on each side meant to say hello we're ready to send or receive there were certainly advantages to this system but there were drawbacks as well that we should keep in mind that spurred future Innovation this system is rather slow and involves the successive lighting and relighting of torches which could be resource intensive so there are still some innovations that could be made and that next Innovation would come in the 18th century by a French clergyman named Claude his device really caught my attention because it is definitely the first Telegraph it may not be the first telecommunications but there is no way that this thing is not the first Telegraph chab actually made several different successful designs for a telegraph in order to display them to the French government both During the Revolution and under Napoleon he had one that depended on a sort of synchronized clock system and then another that used these panels with lights to do a kind of binary thing thing with shutters that could be light or dark but he ultimately didn't like either of those to develop them further which led to the proliferation of this his optical semaphore Telegraph which would eventually be constructed into an entire network of communications around Paris as well as the first telecommunications Agency on the planet the various lines and iterations of the chap Telegraph system were critical to French military and government communication up through the early 19th century even while the electric telegraph was on the scene at one point they successfully tested a design that would allow them to go across the English Channel land on the aisle build a Telegraph and then begin sending messages back to the European continent during a planned invasion of England that didn't happen under Napoleon mobile versions of the device which you can see depicted here were constructed along marching lines and were actually used to great effect during the Crimean War and I'd argue that they continued to be built like this because the design both of the system and of the code were incredibly effective they allowed the French to send messages at a rate that was essentially unparalleled on the European continent at the time the design is pretty straightforward you build a tower that someone can look at with a telescope and on the top of that Tower you put three Big Sticks one big one in the middle called the regulator and two small ones on each side referred to as the indicators they all rotate meaning that you can put them in various different positions which all were used in a code there are 98 usable positions that we know they utilized there were also comprehensive codes for signal control like start of transmission end of transmission acknowledgement error and more another expansion on the design we got a hint of with the pus Square as The Story Goes chap supposedly almost called this device the tacky graph a fast riter before a friend convinced him to change it to the telegraph distant writer which is fitting when you consider that this was literally writing things in the distance and with the aid of a telescope you could put Towers at such a spacing that messages moved incredibly quickly under average conditions a message could supposedly make it the 500 mil to Paris in just 10 minutes which is certainly faster than any letter could make it there news of this device spread around Europe very quickly inspiring copycat optical devices in countries like Sweden for example sponsored by the crown when the electric Telegraph came around there was already a name for what it did because of CLA chap actually early French electric telegraphs had a little device inside of them that looked like a chap Telegraph they'd figured out the concept the codes the design even the name this was the first Telegraph and it had no wires but one morning he made him a slender wire as an artist's Vision took life and form while he drew from Heaven the strange Fierce fire that read the edge of the midnight storm and he carried it over the Mountain's Crest and dropped it into the ocean's breast and science proclaimed from Shore to Shore that time and space ruled man no more okay so those were our first three telegraphs ones with no wires to continue on in the video I should did talk to you about this fourth one this is an electric Telegraph a telegraph with wires I've got a circuit with a light bulb and a telegraph key when I press down on the key the circuit is complete and the light turns on and when I let the key come up the circuit breaks and the light bulb turns off using this system I can tap out short and long bursts on the key to create what we recognize today as Morse code in college I was taught about figures like Samuel Morris and Joseph Henry and Lord Kelvin who all through advances in physics and electrical engineering and cryptography and Manufacturing made the first Global wired Network a reality the history of telecommunications as we know it today sprang from this device it made cheap Global Communication possible for the first time uh the telephone was actually invented while trying to create a better Telegraph known as a harmonic Telegraph there are still code protocols and governing bodies in place today that were first created to manage the electric Telegraph I can't deny the influence that this thing has had on our history but the more I read about the history that led up to the invention of the electric Telegraph the more frustrated I got with the way it's analyzed and taught today to explain my frustration I'm going to tell you about the things that I was taught about this history in my communication studies degree and more importantly the theoretical conclusions we were encouraged to draw based on that history and to do that we need to start with Marshall mclan he's arguably the most important media theorist of the 20th century and he really set the stage for the field of communication studies as we know it today in 1964 he published this book understanding media the extensions of man the first chapter of which is infamously called the medium is the message the basic argument he makes is that you can't understand a new medium unless you understand the way that it irrevocably changes and reshapes Society no matter what you think of a new medium like television or radio or the telegraph it is already actively reshaping the world around you restructuring society and changing the flow of information and the way people relate to each other you have no choice but to participate or as he wrote the effects of Technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or Pace or pattern that it introduces into human Affairs I'm going to critique mclan pretty heavily in a second but it's not because this idea itself is bad necessarily I actually think this is really insightful and true any new communication medium brings with it durable and consequential changes in the way that Society is organized and that is certainly true of the electric Telegraph take for example the way the electric telegraph changed surveillance and law enforcement in 1845 a man named John towel had murdered his mistress before attempting to escape on a train to London but a telegram was sent to the station where he would arrive reading dressed like a Quaker describing the coat he wore to local authorities Towell was arrested at the train station and later put to death because crime could no longer outrun information the telegraph just by existing had redefined the reach and power of local law enforcement agencies and changed the relationship of individuals to the State and this wasn't the only change that instantaneous communication brought the nature of Journalism also changed radically overnight with the invention of the electric Telegraph as a journalist at the time described it the electric Telegraph gives you the news before the circumstances have had time to alter the Press is enabled to lay it fresh before the reader like a steak hot from the grid iron instead of being cooled and rendered flavorless by a slow Journey from a distant kitchen a battle is fought 3,000 Mi away and we have the particulars while they're taking the the wounded to the hospital like the poem I read at the beginning of this section suggests the electric Telegraph led to the collapsing of all space and time and that isn't just poetic it's literally true because of the first instantaneous long-distance communication all information could be known wherever it needed to be known this collapsing of space and time is the message of the telegraph mclan actually noted this same effect in a later chapter in understanding media called the telegraph in his own words we live today in the age of information and communication because electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate from a media Theory perspective the telegraph is most often viewed as a totalizing force that connected the world and changed everything overnight and this view persists into the 21st century one of the most popular histories of the telegraph that I've actually been citing throughout this book is Tom Sage's the Victorian internet standage expands on cluin ideas by suggesting that not only do mediums have their own unique impact but also that we can make comparative analyses between these media in order to understand and act on our modern situation in his view if we can prove that the telegraph is like the internet then maybe we can learn some lessons in how to handle the Internet by looking at how people handled the telegraph their messages are similar so maybe our response should be as well his book shares some charming similarities between the Telegraph and the internet noting stories of confused gender and technological misunderstandings by the elderly he emphasizes a global cable network with its own slang that revolutionized commercial and personal Communications he draws parallel after parallel to the internet and then leaves it up to readers to infer the value of that comparison maybe we shouldn't fret you know after all our great great grandparents had an internet of their own too for those wondering why I'm giving Theory so much airtime at this point in the video I want to point out that this type of analysis has become so popular today that it's almost invisible I was taught these ideas in communication studies school because theorists have found them really popular in the 21st century as we desperately try and understand what the internet is doing to us as a society for example you've probably heard the classic toxic disinhibition argument before you know about how anonimity makes people meaner online and you know it's easy to talk [ __ ] from behind the keyboard you wouldn't be so mean if you had to say that to someone's face that is a mclan idea buried in that argument is the idea that features of the internet like anonymity and physical distance change our Behavior the internet as a medium is acting upon us the medium is the message but the chap system and other early signaling devices that I got obsessed with in the last couple of months reveal something really incomplete about this seminal idea in the field of communication studies they turn this idea around on its head instead of asking how media shape us they ask us to notice how we shape media if we realize that there were telegraphs before the electric one then we have to ask why did the electric one win what conditions allowed it to flourish why is this the telegraph that dominates our Collective memory it wasn't a given that the electric Telegraph would become the biggest Telegraph device around it actually failed to get Congressional support not once but twice which eventually is what left it to private companies with hindsight it seems like an obviously Brilliant Invention that people would want to promote but that ignores the fact that people businesses and governments actually had to make the decisions to promote this device and those decisions to promote or deny the electric Telegraph can only be understood by doing something that Communications majors are famously bad at examining political power to illustrate this point there's actually a fifth kind of telegraph that I said I would return to uh one that could send messages for Miles with no wires that had a complete Code system and that we have documented use of from well before the time of Claude chap drums African talking drums to be specific the englishspeaking world knew as early as 1730 that drums were being used to send messages from miles across the African continent well documented in a 1949 book by Christian Missionary John F carington I've linked a PDF of the book below for fear of butchering an explanation here it's a little more complicated than the other systems I've described in this video but we know it worked it worked so well in fact that some states in colonial America banned drums for fear they were being used to coordinate slave uprisings these weren't going to be remembered as the first telegraphs though and today they're rarely even a footnote in most telecommunication histories and I'd argue that a really big reason they've gone so poorly documented and understood in the west is that they ran contrary to the interests of America and the British Empire Colonial Powers didn't want to understand the drum system or collaborate with its stewards because this ran contrary to their political interests so the global Military and Commercial Powers instead focused on propagating their own Telegraph allowing them to control the channels of information British Imperial Conquest actually played a huge role in popularizing the telegraph as they invested heavily into the construction and management of an ocean-bound Global cable network so that they could keep closer tabs on colonies coordinate military resources and control access to information this is a political decision an instance where power was able to shape the course of media history they didn't lay the transatlantic cables because of science or virtue or the nature of the telegraph as a medium or whatever no they did it because of power and I think it's really unfortunate that this type of analysis where we examine how power shaped the history of media is not taught popularly I certainly wasn't taught it in school and none of these books that I read other than John Carrington's made any reference to this drum system as a real chapter in the history of telecommunications speaking of which I want to return now to the creation of the media by Paul star like I said I would um this type of analysis is actually kind of Paul's Jam he doesn't really get it right on the drums but his whole shtick the thesis of This Book Is that we can't understand the system of communications that we have without understanding the political decisions that shaped it technology and economics alone cannot explain the system of communications we have inherited or the one we are creating the communications media have so direct a bearing on the exercise of power that their development is impossible to understand without taking politics fully into account not simply in the use of the media but in the making of constitutive choices about them he does what I think is a really good job in his section on the telegraph noting how the decision by the United States Congress to neither purchase nor regulate the telegraph eventually led to the first national Monopoly of any kind to emerge out of a previously competitive industry this refers to Western Union who had a very famous bilateral Monopoly with the Associated Press I'm going to cover this in more detail in a future video but I'll run through now what you need to know to understand the rest of this one Western Union's Monopoly was total unimaginable by today's standards because this was literally before Anti-Trust law existed they were able to use their undue power and influence to gain exclusive control over a railroad rights of way exclusive control over the ap's columns and distribution and exclusive control over commercial information it led to higher prices for personal Communications and reduced competition in the Press some have argued in a mclan fashion that this monopolization was simply a feature of the telegraph a logical end of the medium any instantaneous communication network was obviously going to compress and centralize all information into one point so of course we ended up with a monopoly like Western Union but Paul star successfully refutes this claim by noting that the British Telegraph which was nationalized under the post office didn't have these same problems of price hikes and Monopoly control a different political decision led to different outcomes in the media and primary sources at the time corroborate this the average price paid per message in the United States is over 38 cents for 10 words according to the official reports of the Western Union company in England the average charge of all messages sent for the past year was but 27 cents for 20 words star uses this as a natural case study showing how differences in price and availability to the public could lead us to the conclusion that different political decisions led to different outcomes and that we ought not to consider this as some fatally determined quality of the telegraph as a medium and this is where I'm going to try and land this plane and end the video the point of this video is that remembering a medium for its consequences alone will always lead to an incomplete analysis standage and mclan for example both fail to analyze power because that question is entirely excluded from their theoretical framework for both the Telegraph and the internet the medium is the message yes but that doesn't tell us how we ended up with that Medium to begin with if we fail to analyze power and history then we are no better at understanding media than the little AI that runs contexto when we look up and see an increasingly rigid digital world around us a natural reaction is to assume that this was always meant to be that it's out of our control that all of this is just a consequence of the internet as a medium but a much more empowering and accurate analysis is to realize that at some point this was all a telegraph with no wires and some dummy like me or you had to build all of it and maybe if we're willing to do so we can change it did you like this video I hope you did because this is the end of it and you made it here so it' be kind of weird if you didn't like it but that's okay I'm not here to judge if you're new to the channel consider subscribing if you're a returning Channel member I hope you enjoyed the several upgrades that I made in this process like getting a new camera and actually like reading some books instead of blasting you with 10,000 different news articles I'm going to try and make things more like this in the future and the significant time investment to get it off the ground actually is what took me out of commission for the first few months of 2024 so we'll see how the schedule goes going forward but I'm optimistic for more regular uploads at this quality going forward thanks for watching and I'll see you next time
