Humanity is a curious creature by nature, social and competitive to a fault, and has ever been hungry for information, seeking new ways to consume and distribute media of all kinds for thousands of years.
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Norvell on June 11, 1807, more than two centuries before “disinformation” would become a term of art in establishment circles. Jefferson’s political adversary and close friend, John Adams said something similar almost a decade earlier, remarking “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in a hundred years before 1798.” This particular quote prompted The Smithsonian to note far more recently, the “charge feels shockingly modern. Were he to have written the sentiment in 2018, and not at the turn of the 19th century, it’s easy to imagine that at just 112 characters, he might have tweeted it, instead.” Adams, while President, went so far as to pass the first act in American history aimed at stemming the flow of misinformation, the Alien and Sedition Acts, which outlawed false or malicious statements about the Federal government, what we might describe as a blanket gag order on the entire populace. Luther Baldwin was indicted, convicted, and fined for a drunken incident at a parade in Newark that President Adams attended. A gun apparently went off in the crowd, and he yelled “I hope it hit Adams in the arse.” A Congressman from Vermont was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail for describing the Adams Administration as filled with “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” He returned promptly to Congress after serving his sentence. Overall, the Acts proved to be a colossal failure and a potential tool of tyranny, passing into the dustbin of history when they expired a few years later, but the fear of false information spreading out of control has never gone away. The tools of the modern world, be they basic printing presses that seem shockingly primitive from behind our state of the art computer screens to the phones we use to access information today, are uniquely corruptible or outright dangerous. They must be controlled themselves, or society itself might not survive.
The pace at which information, whether true used for malicious purposes or outright false, spreads has also been remarked on over the centuries. Perhaps no one said it better than Winston Churchill long before the information age, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” but he was not alone. The same quote, or a close variation of it, is also attributed to Mark Twain a half century earlier. In his day, the telegraph was the technological marvel that allowed humanity to communicate over long distances almost instantaneously. We can think of the printing press, invented in 1440, as democratizing information, making the written word accessible to the average person and allowing for the distribution of daily, or even multiple times per day, publications devoted to news, culture, and the arts. The telegraph, however, allowed this information to be transmitted across long distances in seconds, crossing continents and oceans so long as a simple cable could be stretched that far. Samuel Morse is generally credited with the invention, presenting his ideas to Congress in 1832. By 1843, he’d built a prototype network connecting Baltimore and Washington, DC. By 1861, Western Union had connected the East and West Coasts, allowing a message to travel some three thousand miles in an instant, what most would consider an incredible advance given messages had to be physically carried from place to place up to that point, but even before that achievement, The New York Times editorialized in 1858, “Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column?” Similar to The Smithsonian, this prompted The Atlantic to remark in 2014, “it reads like it could have been written today by a print nostalgist about the benefits and evils of the Internet.”
Likewise, the various dislocations and disconnectedness prompted by the telegraph and other inventions popularized during the Industrial Revolution caused many commentators, from the media to famous philosophers, to claim that society had reached a dangerous, dead end. Technology was not a tool that enabled us to live better lives than ever before, democratizing information and everything else. It was potentially a danger to us all, separating people from one another and upending everything in its path. As early as 1829, even before the telegraph, Thomas Carlyle, the British essayist and historian, warned about the modern day that was dawning. The language might seem dated by today’s standards, but the sentiment is much the same. “Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance…There is no end to machinery…For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.” Carlyle continued to describe the impact on people in the social and moral sphere, including an attack on celebrity. “What morality we have takes the shape of Ambition, or ‘Honour’: beyond money and money’s worth, our only rational blessedness is Popularity…By arguing on the ‘force of circumstances’; we have argued away all force from ourselves; and stand leashed together, uniform in dress and movement, like the rowers of some boundless galley. This and that may be right and true; but we must not do it.” John Stewart Mill, a Member of Parliament and a renowned philosopher noted around the same period, “A state of society where any voice, not pitched in an exaggerated key, is lost in the hubbub. Success in so crowded a field depends not upon what a person is, but upon what he seems: mere marketable qualities become the object instead of substantial ones, and a man’s capital and labour are expended less in doing anything than in persuading other people that he has done it. Our own age has seen this evil brought to its consummation.”
Perhaps most incredibly, a cartoon from 1906 depicted a man and a woman in old-fashioned clothes complete with a fancy hat and tophat, seated beneath a tree in park, but not looking directly at one another. Both are looking down at their telegraphs instead, the same as we would our phones. The caption reads, “These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady receives an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results.” This is not to suggest that media and technology have not had an ever changing impact on culture since the emergence of computers as the platform of choice and the start of the information age. The pace of change itself has rapidly accelerated in recent decades along with the quantity of content we are exposed to; further, our ability to tailor this content to our liking, and the distributors’ ability to target users based on our personal data is measurably different than they were before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket. There will undoubtedly be unique challenges that develop as a result of these and other recent trends, but the fact that many of the concerns we have to today were voiced in the very same form, in some cases more than two centuries ago, should serve as enough evidence that much of this is a difference of degree rather than kind. Most seem to think our ancestors were merely passive consumers of information, living their lives in relative isolation with their immediate family save for the occasional rumor or newspaper. Some might even imagine that this was the natural state of affairs and people as a whole were more contented with their limited lifestyles, not knowing or caring what was happening on the other side of the country or the world, and better off that way. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Humanity is a curious creature by nature, social and competitive to a fault, and has ever been hungry for information, seeking new ways to consume and distribute media of all kinds for thousands of years.
The newspaper today is generally seen as a passive vehicle. A person still interested in such things either seeks one out and buys it from a stand or enrolls in a subscription, receiving news every morning that is already out of date, but that wasn’t always the case. Even at the time of the founding newspapers were published twice per day, updated with the latest stories as they unfolded. Today, we talk about the twenty four hour news cycle, but there was already a 12 hour cycle in place hundreds of years ago and by the early 1800’s at least, distribution wasn’t passive, far from it. Publishers broadcast the news, especially in urban or more densely populated areas, by employing “hawkers” who would literally stand on street corners and scream the headlines to those passing by. Among the first was said to be a 10-year old Irish immigrant, Bernard Flaherty, who would cry out the day’s most sensational news, “Double Distilled Villainy,” “Cursed Effects of Drunkenness,” “Awful Occurrence!,” Infamous Affair!” The news would also be displayed on bulletin boards and other public spaces, the same as the tickers in Times Square.
Interestingly, the man who perhaps is most responsible for the invention of the modern world, Thomas Edison, began his career hawking newspapers on a train running from Port Huron, Ohio to Detroit, Michigan at the tender age of 13. Not content merely to sell what others printed, he began his own publication a few years later, The Grand Trunk Herald, and printed it on the train itself. Even before then, Edison sensed an opportunity in the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh on April 9, 1862. He arrived in Detroit to see crowds gathered around the bulletin boards, eager for news of the unexpected assault on Union forces. General Grant ultimately triumphed over General P. G. T. Beauregard, after his former superior General Albert S. Johnston was killed, but at a cost of some 60,000 lives. Edison moved fast to capitalize on the news of the day, contacting the telegraph operator for the train and paying him in three months worth of free magazines to request operators further up the line post headlines outside of the stations on the route, announcing the news would be for sale when the train arrived. Next, he secured 1,000 copies of The Detroit Free Press on credit and somehow managed to get them on the train for a 4 PM departure. As he described the return trip to Port Huron, “I saw a crowd ahead on the platform [and] thought it was some excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush for me; then I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I sold 35 papers; the next station, Mt. Clemens, [was] a place of about 1,000. I usually sold 6 to 8 papers. I decided that if I found a corresponding crowd the only thing to do to correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers was to raise the price from 5 cents to 10. The crowd was there and I raised the price; at various times there were corresponding crowds.” By the time he reached the last stop, the crowds had grown larger and the price had increased to 25 cents. “I then yelled 25 cents a piece, gentlemen, I haven’t got enough to go round. I sold all out and made what to me then was an immense amount of money. I started the next day to learn telegraphy.” Shiloh, Tennessee is located almost 700 miles from Port Huron, and yet even in 1862, news of the battle took less than 48 hours to travel that distance in the hands of an enterprising teenager. One should also note the irony: Edison’s short lived career in the newspaper business started him on the path to changing the world.
A little less than four decades later, when his lightbulb lit American homes and his phonograph filled the air with music, Edison would be a staunch supporter of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was born during the Civil War and witnessed as much change as any of us as electricity, media, transportation, warfare, and almost every aspect of life continued to be revolutionized at rate never seen before in human history. Roosevelt would ride to war on a horse in Cuba in 1898, becoming the hero of the Spanish American War, but would be the first President to fly in an airplane in 1910, less than twelve years later. Somehow, however, he – nor the great majority of his contemporaries – never lost sight of what made America great in the first place. Amid unprecedented change, he wrote of America as the “crowning and greatest achievement” of a long sweep of history dating back to King Alfred the Great prior to 1,000 AD. Of Americans themselves, he said “our greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done.” “At no period in the world’s history, has life been so full of interest, and of possibilities of excitement and enjoyment.” If a person was observant, “he notes all around him the play of vaster forces than have ever before been exerted, working, half blindly, half under control, to bring about immeasurable results.” These words are perhaps even more true today, but few would say them. This is the heart of what’s been lost, the root cause of our problems, and, the same as it was in his day, it’s not the media or technology’s fault. The fault lies in each of us, instead.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 