The innovation of the telegraph can stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history and determined, even to this day, the major lines of development of American communications. The most important fact about the telegraph is at once the most obvious and innocent: It permitted for the first time the effective separation of communication from transportation. - Carey, page 203
Carey's analysis of the telegraph (and the railroad) takes us deeper down the rabbit hole we discussed last week regarding the imagined community of the nation by highlighting how the separation of communication from transportation broadened our sense of awareness of time. This shift in awareness significantly transformed trade, helped to centralize government power, and broadened a previously localized experience of time to a nationalized and standardized one.
Transforming Trade
Carey begins by addressing how the telegraph affected monopoly capitalism to the extent that it forced processes of production to adapt to the new, more rapid form of communication. He states,
the volume and speed of transactions demanded a new form of organization of essentially impersonal relations - that is, relations not among known persons but among buyers and sellers whose only relation was mediated through an organization and a structure of management. - Carey, page 205
My interpretation of this is that the organizational shift in business relations led to a more impersonal set of interactions among staff that both flattened and distanced the experience by making everyone faceless and therefore similar but also unknown. Carey later discusses how there was also a standardization of products (not just business interactions) that allowed for rapid trade of mass amounts of product to happen. I wonder whether one beget the other: Was capitalism already heading in this direction and needed a tool like the telegraph to best pull it off? Or did the telegraph set off light bulbs in businessmen across the country? I imagine it's a bit of both but I'm not sure where Carey stands.
Centralizing Imperial Government
Carey brings up another example of how the separation of communication and travel broadened our awareness when he discusses how the transatlantic cable and the telegraph created "a system in which the center of an empire could dictate rather than merely respond to the margin" (page 212). Power was no longer local by default and I imagine that this must have had some major effects on how colonies were managed and self-perceived as a component of the empire.
Carey also discusses the standardization of time and how this came about. I read this as another example of a structure that allowed us to imagine the nation as one community. I would agree with his statement on page 224 that:
the control of time allows for the coordination of activity and, therefore, effective social control.
I see it as another imagined layer to the social structures we create for ourselves, which frankly, is a bit worrisome!
I think your interpretation in the "transforming trade" section of your post is right, but I would add that I think Carey is talking not just about relations among staff, but also between consumers and producers. Not only do organizations of production become much larger operations (which is the alienation process I think you're referring to here), but even more basically goods are being transported farther afield, to consumers who do not know the producers. So the individual producers are both literally and figuratively distanced from the products, and the consumers are both literally and figuratively distanced from the producers (and the culmination of all this seems to be the trade of futures, in which the product doesn't even exist yet at the time of trade).
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