Page 20 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

cover the distance. The system eventually expanded to 556 stations covering and 4,800 kilometers, and remained in use for military and national com- munications until the 1850s when it was superseded by the electric telegraph. The Morse code for the electric telegraph allowed another incremental ad- vance in speed, but like the optical telegraph, remained a method of trans- mitting individual characters or words by code, except over electric wires rather than line of sight—a major advantage in speed and efficiency, since messages were not delayed by low visibility caused by overcast, could also be sent in the dark, and could go longer distances between relay stations.
As in other fields of information transmission, technical advances in com- munication and information theory as well as practice caused speed of com- munication to accelerate to essentially instantaneous transmission, speed enhancements being one of the most frequent “new and improved” an- nouncements we receive, as we reach light speed with optical transmission. With so much of the world networked, all of us have access to a quantity and diversity of digital information that is unprecedented and incalculably larger and more diverse than any time before. Without the space limitations of print, media can publish enormous texts and keep them archived for easy access. Wikileaks, founded in December 2006, could expose hundreds of thousands of secret documents in 2016, and online newspapers can publish their selections without concern to the restraints of size or weight of their publications or the cost of paper.9
There is also the matter of scale with respect to time. Change in media occurred slowly in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, sometimes re- quiring centuries for measurable change; the pace began to accelerate with the introduction of printing by movable type in the mid-fifteenth century, advancing inexorably during the so-called incunabula period of printing be-
9 The limitless volume of information has, of course, raised appropriate questions about its quality and reliability. Rapid innovation in formats and storage media have raised different questions of preservation when data is so rapidly created, and may be just as rapidly destroyed. When I completed this essay in 2020 the problems of long-term storage and retrieval of information were being addressed by many organizations but remained unsolved, except for the understanding that digital files require periodic updating in file formats and storage media.
20