Pub Date : 2021-02-16DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0002
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
The first chapter takes up the promise of perfect technology and theories of materialism to clarify religion’s role in the establishment of the global telegraph network. Among the primary agents for Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail’s machine were US Protestant missionaries who equated the adoption of new technology with a process of civilization that would lead to religious conversion. For many of these missionaries, especially Cyrus Hamlin, urging the world toward Protestantism entailed also urging the world toward new technology: the medium was the mission. The chapter traces the role of technology in missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the twisting story of telegraphy in the Ottoman Empire—a volatile mix of connection and disconnection as colonial interests, imperial goals, and diverse forms of resistance wove the network through the land and then used the network to take down the empire itself.
{"title":"What’s the Matter with Networks?","authors":"Jenna Supp-Montgomerie","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The first chapter takes up the promise of perfect technology and theories of materialism to clarify religion’s role in the establishment of the global telegraph network. Among the primary agents for Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail’s machine were US Protestant missionaries who equated the adoption of new technology with a process of civilization that would lead to religious conversion. For many of these missionaries, especially Cyrus Hamlin, urging the world toward Protestantism entailed also urging the world toward new technology: the medium was the mission. The chapter traces the role of technology in missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the twisting story of telegraphy in the Ottoman Empire—a volatile mix of connection and disconnection as colonial interests, imperial goals, and diverse forms of resistance wove the network through the land and then used the network to take down the empire itself.","PeriodicalId":350988,"journal":{"name":"When the Medium Was the Mission","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114700278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-16DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0004
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
This chapter addresses the potent US utopianism that greeted the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. US Americans tethered perfection to new telegraph technology with all the idealism utopia has come to connote but without the spatial or temporal inaccessibility that we traditionally associate with the “no-place” coined by Thomas More in his 1516 Utopia. In most formulations, utopia is set in a far-off land or distant future. Yet for many US Americans, the moment the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was strung across the ocean and Morse code was sent pulsing beneath the waves, this technologically empowered utopian world began to arrive. With an anchoring focus on the Oneida Community, a small religious community that became obsessed with the telegraph’s possibilities for unity among all people and with God, this chapter argues that in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, utopia was not understood as a distant land or future event. Rather, the utopianism of this network imaginary demands a redefinition of utopia as proximate.
{"title":"The End of Distance and the End of War","authors":"Jenna Supp-Montgomerie","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses the potent US utopianism that greeted the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. US Americans tethered perfection to new telegraph technology with all the idealism utopia has come to connote but without the spatial or temporal inaccessibility that we traditionally associate with the “no-place” coined by Thomas More in his 1516 Utopia. In most formulations, utopia is set in a far-off land or distant future. Yet for many US Americans, the moment the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was strung across the ocean and Morse code was sent pulsing beneath the waves, this technologically empowered utopian world began to arrive. With an anchoring focus on the Oneida Community, a small religious community that became obsessed with the telegraph’s possibilities for unity among all people and with God, this chapter argues that in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, utopia was not understood as a distant land or future event. Rather, the utopianism of this network imaginary demands a redefinition of utopia as proximate.","PeriodicalId":350988,"journal":{"name":"When the Medium Was the Mission","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122567498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-16DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0003
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
This chapter explores the promise of social unity through networks by looking at the religious nationalism that emerged in the United States around the Atlantic telegraph. As Americans tensely watched the struggle to transmit the world’s first transatlantic telegram, a diverse community—from Protestant missionaries to civic leaders—spoke of the newly united world that electric speech would create in explicitly Christian terms. Public statements that claimed the telegraph as destined and blessed by God were not merely religious ways of speaking about the telegraph; the affective weight born by this Christian vocabulary and imagery forged the affiliation of the telegraph with dreams of global unity in particularly durable ways. This chapter examines alternative imaginaries of obsolete telegraphs (e.g., grapevine telegraph, spiritual telegraph, optical telegraph) that have lost cultural meaning to demonstrate that affect, not the technology itself, produced and sustained network imaginaries of national and global connection. The fragile cable of 1858 and the united “whole world” it was said to create point to the materiality and contingency inherent in the discursive and affective labor of forming public culture.
{"title":"The Great Fizzle","authors":"Jenna Supp-Montgomerie","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the promise of social unity through networks by looking at the religious nationalism that emerged in the United States around the Atlantic telegraph. As Americans tensely watched the struggle to transmit the world’s first transatlantic telegram, a diverse community—from Protestant missionaries to civic leaders—spoke of the newly united world that electric speech would create in explicitly Christian terms. Public statements that claimed the telegraph as destined and blessed by God were not merely religious ways of speaking about the telegraph; the affective weight born by this Christian vocabulary and imagery forged the affiliation of the telegraph with dreams of global unity in particularly durable ways. This chapter examines alternative imaginaries of obsolete telegraphs (e.g., grapevine telegraph, spiritual telegraph, optical telegraph) that have lost cultural meaning to demonstrate that affect, not the technology itself, produced and sustained network imaginaries of national and global connection. The fragile cable of 1858 and the united “whole world” it was said to create point to the materiality and contingency inherent in the discursive and affective labor of forming public culture.","PeriodicalId":350988,"journal":{"name":"When the Medium Was the Mission","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130844375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-16DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0005
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
This chapter explores the promises and failures of communication through an analysis of what was sent on the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. It is a strange sort of content analysis, however, since most of the communication on the cable consisted of mere signals before the cable was capable of transmitting code, and even much of the code the cable could transmit consisted of a single letter. The V—a Beethovenian dot-dot-dot-dash in Morse code—became the primary way to reestablish connection after failure. These transmissions read more like babble than meaning, more like a stutter than speech. As such, they help to illustrate the constitutive disconnections that make communication possible and, in particular, highlight the telegraph’s inauguration of a new form of language that neither represented things in the world nor referenced a system of meaning: the signal. With particular attention to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, and James Carey, this chapter turns to infrastructure as a supplement to structural and poststructural theories of communication and argues that the creative, affective force of religion made these essentially meaningless signals matter. Even before the Atlantic Telegraph Cable could transmit speech, it carried the hefty imaginary of a divinely sanctioned global unity.
{"title":"“Received but Not Intelligible”","authors":"Jenna Supp-Montgomerie","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479801480.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the promises and failures of communication through an analysis of what was sent on the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. It is a strange sort of content analysis, however, since most of the communication on the cable consisted of mere signals before the cable was capable of transmitting code, and even much of the code the cable could transmit consisted of a single letter. The V—a Beethovenian dot-dot-dot-dash in Morse code—became the primary way to reestablish connection after failure. These transmissions read more like babble than meaning, more like a stutter than speech. As such, they help to illustrate the constitutive disconnections that make communication possible and, in particular, highlight the telegraph’s inauguration of a new form of language that neither represented things in the world nor referenced a system of meaning: the signal. With particular attention to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, and James Carey, this chapter turns to infrastructure as a supplement to structural and poststructural theories of communication and argues that the creative, affective force of religion made these essentially meaningless signals matter. Even before the Atlantic Telegraph Cable could transmit speech, it carried the hefty imaginary of a divinely sanctioned global unity.","PeriodicalId":350988,"journal":{"name":"When the Medium Was the Mission","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128263586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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