Fears and anxieties about the latest technologies are nothing new, say Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt, authors of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter. But neither is the fact that they often provide new ways for us to connect and socialize.
Mark Twain is rumored to have said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Of late, much press has been spent on uncovering those rhymes, focusing on the similarities between the current epidemic and past ones. These stories underscore the lesson that progress hasn't allowed us to escape the suffering of earlier generations, for the persistence of plagues roots us more to the past than we initially thought. While technology promised to let us escape history, our biology—our bodies and their pestilences—has kept us shackled to it.
These accounts are to some degree true. But they are by no means the whole story. If history rhymes as a result of biology, it also rhymes as a result of (rather than in spite of) technology.
Consider the conspiracy theorists who believe 5G Networks transmit the COVID-19 virus. Acting on their suspicions, they've burned and vandalized cell phone towers across Europe. In England alone, there have been 30 attacks on towers. As Amy Davidson Sorkin observes in the New Yorker, they suspect the towers of harming humans’ immune systems, emitting dangerous radiation, or perhaps even transmitting coronavirus. One might ask what quirk of our present culture would lead to such outlandish theories about COVID-19 and communications. Yet dismaying as the rumors and vandalism are, they closely resemble past fears about disease and communications technology.
In 1849, a cholera epidemic swept the globe, and as many people struggled to understand its causes, some pointed the finger at the telegraph (created 5 years before), believing there was a connection between electricity and the deadly illness. According to Alvin Harlow, an early historian of the telegraph, East Coast newspapers “began whispering the rumor that the telegraph might be responsible for the spread of the great cholera epidemic of 1849.” In its early years, Southern preachers suspected the telegraph also brought other ailments—like bad weather. After listening to their minister blame the telegraph for drought conditions, Kentucky Baptists rushed out of their church and “collectively cut down several miles of poles and [carried]… off the wires.”
If current anxieties about COVID-19 and communication technologies rhyme with past worries, so does the gratitude that so many feel about being connected in the midst of the pandemic. For example, around the world, people are marveling at the fact that while COVID-19 has quarantined us in our houses, social media allows us to be alone together. The recent penchant for Zoom rendezvous and virtual partying seems like a new development; some observers contend it will remake our social habits long after we develop herd immunity. But before prophesizing overmuch, we should remember that in the telephone’s early days, “party lines” (instead of private, one-on-one calls) were the norm, and literally were what they were called. H.E. Wilkinson, who lived on an isolated Iowa farm in the early 1900s, recalled, “We often made good use of that party line for an evening’s entertainment. With no radio, no television, no record player, no car to dash to town in, and no movies,” a traveling peddler who played the “Jew’s harp was the sensation of the neighborhood.” When he was ready to play, the family hosting him would ring up the neighborhood; whole families would gather around a small receiver. “[R]eception was somewhat difficult to say the least…But we thought the music was wonderful, we who were so hungry for diversion of any kind…It was entertainment, and it was coming mysteriously over that slender thread of wire strung on poles along our fence lines.”
Out on windswept, wintry farms, party lines made sociability possible. Phone lines bound people together in cities and towns too. While today, Yo-Yo Ma plays “Songs of Comfort” via Twitter, nineteenth century orchestras played concerts over the telephone to accompany partiers at distant dances. In 1877, the New York Tribune reported: “At the telegraphers’ reception in Chicago on Feb. 12, the dancers waltzed to music played in Milwaukee, 85 miles away.” And like today, preachers found use for the phone as well, offering “sermons by telephone.”
In times of sickness, radio has also had connective effects, just as Zoom does today. In its early days, listeners isolated because of illness marveled at being connected to others from afar. As E. E. Ricker of Lynn, Massachusetts, wrote in a 1923 fan letter to a pioneering radio station: “I am a shut-in and have to sit all day ‘day in and day out’ away from the busy activities of life which I used so much to enjoy. But I find in my Radio my constant companion, affording me an almost constant source of entertainment, and instruction….”
And reminiscent of current speculations about whether students may end up gaining their education from their living rooms as they wait for COVID-19 to pass, in radio’s early days, some suggested physical college campuses might disappear, for university degrees could be earned by tuning into “colleges of the air.” By the 1930s, dozens of universities from Harvard to Kansas State offered on-air courses. A 1924 observer wondered if radio spelled the end of brick-and-mortar universities, asking, “Will the classroom be abolished, and the child of the future stuffed with facts as he sits at home…with his portable receiving-set in his pocket?”
Historians often lament that we suffer from historical amnesia. Worse yet, some say that we are chronocentric—convinced we live in times so singular and unique, so sundered from the past, that it would be fruitless to look to yesteryear for anything that might add meaning to our present lives. Not so. In our current pandemic, we’ve already been disabused of the notion that progress has allowed us to escape the plagues and miseries of the past. In that same spirit, we shouldn’t imagine that the vandals burning down 5G cell towers have no precursors. Or that being alone together, or Zoom parties are entirely new things. If our biology links us to our past, so too does our technology.
