Print eventually became an instrument for producing standard and consistent versions of books and other texts, as well as for diffusing officially sanctioned forms of language and the works that embody them, but at the start the spread of printed texts had just the opposite effect, producing a situation of near-anarchy. Barely twenty years after Gutenberg first produced books printed with movable type an Italian scholar wrote to a friend that his hopes that the new invention would enrich the literate world by making previously unobtainable texts available to all those who desired to read them had been dashed because printers and publishers not only produced and diffused trash that would have been better forgotten; even “when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books.” The early history of printing provided many illustrations of this plaint. The world of print was shot through with piracy, committed by printers and booksellers whose ease of access to literary markets encouraged them to produce unauthorized versions of texts of all kinds, including biblical translations, recently rediscovered classical works, sermon collections, scientific treatises, and contemporary literature. The versions they put out were often unreliable, badly proofread, with texts and images that did not conform to authors’ or editors’ intentions; the information given about place and date of publication was just as likely to be false as true, there being no mechanisms to verify or regulate it. This situation was not wholly unlike that in other trades, where shoddy goods were often produced when merchants eager to evade guild regulations put out work to people whose skills did not come up to craft standards; but books and pamphlets were more vulnerable to disorder because the core material used to produce the objects, the texts, did not have to be replaced like raw wool or ore as they were turned into cloth or metal. Supply costs were still less when the author’s or editor’s rights to compensation were simply ignored. Reflecting on the content of printed matter both in the eighteenth century and in our own time, Robert Darnton concludes that information is “always unstable.”9
The histories of later media show that this anarchic potential of communications networks and the need to counter it was well understood by those who held power. This was notably true in regard to the telegraph, whose potentials and dangers were recognized even before the advent of electric telegraphy in the 1830s. In France an earlier system of sending messages semaphorically, spanning broad distances by virtue of a series of hilltop relay stations, was set up under the Revolution to furnish reports on battles. This “Chappe telegraph,” named for its inventor, was expanded under Napoleon and remained important into the middle of the nineteenth century, providing rapid communication for journalists and financiers as well as officials, but always under the control of the state. That restraint was quickly extended to the Morse telegraph soon after the device became practicable, in 1837. What moved the state to assert its authority at that moment was a scandal involving attempts by private individuals to profit from price changes on the Paris Bourse by sending wire reports to agents at other exchanges in the country. When it was discovered that no law existed under which such actions could be prosecuted, one was quickly put in force, imposing punishment on “whoever transmits signals from one place to another without authorization, whether by telegraphic machines or any other means.” Not only was the state to be the sole operator, but no one else would be allowed to send messages on its grid, for fear that conspirators or rebels would find ways to transmit coded communications to their allies. Only in 1850 was the (still limited) French network opened up to users outside the government, partly as a way to finance the system and partly out of pressure from commercial interests; even so the content of despatches was to be strictly overseen. In Prussia too the government controlled the construction and management of the lines, limiting their early use to administration and propaganda (beginning with the reports about doings in the Frankfurt Assembly sent to officials in Berlin over the wires in 1848).10 Such arrangements, by restricting communication at a distance, paid tribute to the potential powers that rapid exchange of information was understood to bring.
The advent of telegraphy confronted people with a number of experiences and problems characteristic of newly powerful communication networks. One was a heightened sense of simultaneous proximity and distance, as instantaneous messages and reports arrived from far-flung and diverse places. The sudden awareness of the telegraph’s capacity to transcend locality and abolish distance led people to exaggerate its power to transform life. Some compared it to God in its seeming ability to allow people to be in many scattered places at the same time, others to the nervous system as a vehicle for instantly transmitting perceptions to a center where they could be processed, and instructions to points where they were expected to be followed. Much benefit was anticipated, for instance in bringing unity to fragmented countries, but it was quickly recognized that forces of discord such as political factions could draw strength from the telegraph too. Enthusiasts argued that illicit behavior, such as theft, elopement, and political subversion, could be brought under control by authorities able to broadcast information rapidly and widely, but their predictions were undermined as some of the objects of surveillance discovered ways to communicate by telegraph too, at least where government control was weak: in England some Chartists found ways to transmit plans and ideas to each other by wire in the 1840s. Diffusing information of all kinds was seen as a major benefit from the start, but very soon public recognition spread about the harm that could result from false or simply mistaken reports, as well as from misunderstandings about what the messages sent by faraway people with unfamiliar vocabularies actually meant.
All these factors contributed to establishing a large degree of governmental control over telegraph systems in practically every European country by around 1870. In France and Germany, as we saw, telegraphy was put under strict governmental management from the start; in England a similar result emerged when the Post Office took over the administration of lines and offices from three private companies in 1868, partly in response to complaints about the unreliability of their service. These situations did not put an end to anxieties about the ways dishonest or unscrupulous people could employ telegraphy, or its power to mislead or deceive the public; novelists such as Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, and Émile Zola all voiced such concerns, and an American observer in the mid 1860s feared that the private monopoly achieved by the Western Union Company would “fatally pollute the very foundation of public opinion.” Politicians were not above turning this potential to their own ends, as in Bismarck’s use of the “Ems Telegram” to provoke war with France in 1870 and the British Secret Service’s circulation of an intercepted German communication (the “Zimmerman telegram”) as part of the effort to bring the United States into World War I.11
Later media – the telephone, radio, television – would exhibit powers telegraphy lacked, and thereby fulfill more of the expectations it aroused, but no previous network could generate the rapid and ubiquitous impact of the Internet. The Web’s powers are rooted to be sure in the remarkable technology it employs, in which computers widely available at relatively low cost and able to store and process enormous quantities of data replace earlier means of linking individuals to each other, allowing a far wider range of interactions both personal and public. All the same, it was crucial to the life and development of the Internet that the technology that made it possible came into a world where intellectual and cultural contents of all kinds were already and increasingly being embodied in a great mass of what Simmel called “objective” or “supra-individual” forms, constituting an ever-more-widely available accumulation of cultural capital. Drawing on some parts of this trove required considerable personal resources of education or experience, but others, as in the rapidly growing networks of popular culture, were much more widely open and accessible.
Those interested in the origins of the Internet have recently been reminded that the people usually regarded as its modern
inventors had a visionary but largely forgotten early twentieth-century predecessor, the Belgian librarian Paul Otlet, who worked over many years to assemble a central body of references to all the world’s available knowledge. Technologically his project remained far from what would emerge in the 1990s, especially since he could not imagine his grand repository save as a collection of index cards, each inscribed with some piece of information, and all filed in some central place. By the 1930s, however, he had worked out a plan to link the cards to the texts and images they identified by numeric symbols, and thus to make the catalogue an entry point to books, recordings, and even – although he assigned this part to the future – video clips. Access to this treasury of information was to be provided by a network (réseau) of “electric telescopes.” Thus individuals scattered around the world would be able to search within the body of “objective culture” Simmel described, at once drawing nurture from it and contributing to its growth: “From his armchair, everyone will hear, see, participate, will even be able to applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus, add his cries of participation to those of all the others.”12
The Internet’s relationship to this pre-existing treasury of information was evident both in the vision that inspired its early architects and in the ways it developed. The original impetus for creating the World Wide Web came from natural scientists looking for new ways (as the person with probably the best claim to be called the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote in 1991) “to allow high-energy physicists to share data, news and documentation.” What generated a widespread desire for extending and tightening such connections was the ongoing evolution of the networks of professional researchers and their implements created a hundred years before by the expansion of university departments and later private and government-sponsored laboratories, linked by periodicals, correspondence, and regular meetings.13 This development engendered a felt need for ever-more-rapid connections as the reduced access costs of information and the expansion in the numbers of researchers accelerated the pace of new discoveries and the pressures to keep abreast of them. Although the need for ever-closer links was felt most strongly in natural science, members of other disciplines found significant benefits in such ties too, and Berners-Lee and his early colleagues spoke explicitly about making the kinds of connections they sought to establish available in other fields. Knowingly or not, their vision echoed such earlier ones as Paul Otlet’s dream of providing universal access to the world’s total repository of acquired knowledge through a network of “electric telescopes.”14
People involved in business and commerce quickly recognized that their enterprises could be furthered and expanded by creating their own versions of the chains being constructed by scientists and researchers. One reason the Internet could serve them better than any previous way of diffusing information is that computers were not originally and continue to be not solely media of communication, but are simultaneously means and instruments of work, at the start higher-level calculators and typewriters. Both of these devices, it should be noted, entered into practical use in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as larger-scale enterprises linked to distant suppliers and markets sought ways to manage and exchange the larger bodies of information they employed. Early personal computers were used chiefly for one or both of these functions (both word- and data-processing spread rapidly in the mid 1980s, a few years before the first steps were taken toward the World Wide Web), and more advanced ones, linked to the Internet, have continued to be tools for accomplishing complex tasks – not just the management of text and data, but the further development of the machines’ own capacities through writing new software. Software writers sometimes work independently of others much in the way of many mathematicians, theoretical scientists, historians, and philosophers, but one of the most significant developments in the Internet that testifies to its status as an instrument at once of work and of communication has been the emergence of cooperative sites for creating and developing “open-source” software, for which the basic codes are publicly available (not “proprietary”) and participants build constantly on the work of others (the “Firefox” Internet browser is one striking example).
These features of the Internet show particularly well the way it exemplifies some of the chief characteristics of a network of means we noted at the start, and that were already evident in the early modern putting-out system and Republic of Letters: the linking up of tools and implements across distances and the creation of synergies between them, competition between products both material and intellectual fashioned at different places and in different circumstances, the challenges to local and established ideas and practices that arise through contact with distant alternatives, and the added motivation to employ otherwise dormant energies and capacities in productive ways. The last-listed element is particular evident on the Web not just in software development but also in the creation of cooperative repositories of information such as Wikipedia, where large numbers of individuals all devoting limited quantities of spare time to a common project combine to create an effective instrument out of otherwise diffuse and unfocused capacities; the only compensation most contributors receive is personal satisfaction or the expectation that the product will serve their own and others’ needs. To be sure the same access to distant resources and benefits opens up possibilities for people to give misinformation, pursue selfish agendas, appropriate others’ work or exploit them in some way, just as was the case in the early history of printing; but mechanisms to police or counter such activities have followed closely behind. Taken together these features constitute much of what Yochai Benkler has called “the wealth of networks,” the expanding store of energies and resources that those who are joined together through them create and employ by way of their interactions.15
Recognizing that networks of means generate such a sui generis form of wealth and registering its contributions to the evolution at once of bourgeois life and of modernity have been central concerns of this book. Giving attention to continuities between the Internet and earlier networks may seem to shift our focus so much toward modernity that it leaves bourgeois life behind, but there are at least two significant ways in which the Internet can be understood as a bourgeois phenomenon. First, the practical activities the Internet chiefly serves and to which it imparts new energy are precisely the three that historians and others have long recognized as distinctively bourgeois, and that earlier networks of means affected in similar ways: business, public administration, and the professions (including to be sure a range of cultural ones). Each of the three has put its separate stamp on the evolution of social and individual life, but all have simultaneously served the common function noted at the start, namely providing the mediations through which individuals and groups establish operative relations with other people and with resources of all kinds at a distance, providing frames for the complex and extended “chains of purposive action” Simmel recognized as at work throughout modern existence. Because the Internet provides a universal frame for such mediation, it is a prototypical embodiment of the structural features of modernity on which we have focused here. Second, the cultural life fostered by the web of online communications bears two signal features that mark it as the descendent of the nineteenth-century sphere of culture that initially emerged as a chiefly bourgeois phenomenon: first, as we have already had occasion to note, it continues and extends the accumulation of intellectual and artistic resources in the “supra-individual” or “objective” forms Simmel recognized as constituting a kind of shared treasury of assets; and second, the Internet at once renews and heightens the public and palpable character of modern culture, its condition as a culture of means, and creates new spaces of unsupervisable private appropriation, allowing individuals and the groupings they form to access and employ its materials in unpredictable ways.
To be sure, many of the people whose lives are affected by the Internet cannot reasonably be labeled as bourgeois, at least not in the sense the term commonl
y bore before 1914. But the increasingly permeable boundary between bourgeois and non-bourgeois spheres of action and experience, and the ways in which bourgeois life itself has been transformed by the modernizing forces in good part generated out of it, have been central objects of this inquiry all along. Bourgeois have been key figures in establishing the mediated interactions at a distance that provide the framework of modernity, but the power to give concrete form to abstractions, of which money is the paradigmatic expression, is too basic a feature of humanity to have been confined to any single social group. Rulers seeking to link together localities with diverse features and formerly separate identities often pursued their goals by projecting a uniform grid of procedures and obligations over a broad territory, and in some contexts governments and officials engaged in such projects have been more important in making life bourgeois (and notably bürgerlich) than have bourgeois themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century a much larger range of social groups, some – such as workers and women – previously more restricted inside the local contexts most of them chiefly inhabited, were finding readier access to the resources provided by distant relations too.
One reason why bourgeois were hardly less transformed by these developments than others is that bourgeois life itself had long been largely shaped and molded by local attachments and conditions, and by the teleocratic principles that supported them, even when individual bourgeois were active in the more distant relations that generated alternatives to them. Town-based traditions and guild regulations governed activities and social relations in many places even into the nineteenth century, and the notables and Honoratioren who were so prominent at the mid century owed their status first of all to their positions in some locality or region. The extension and thickening of networks of means recast the way bourgeois inhabited their worlds no less than the ways others lived in theirs: it replaced the manifold and complex forms of civic privileges in German towns with uniform conditions of citizenship and crystallized the distinction between upper bourgeois and Kleinbürger; it turned Parisian property owners and manufacturers from an earlier “introverted” style to a more modern “extroverted” one and created the conditions whereby the peuple excluded from the pays légal of the “Bourgeois Monarchy” could become part of Gambetta’s enlarged and republican bourgeois France; it underlay the shift from the private forms of money still dominant in the early nineteenth century to the public ones that were replacing them by its end and gave scope to Walter Bagehot’s understanding that the function of a central bank was not to protect already acquired national wealth in the manner of a private person but assure the continuity of public exchanges, and it found expression in the increasing absorption of the local cultures that flourished in mid nineteenth-century English cities into national media emerging to prominence by the 1920s. These evolutions – and the list could easily be lengthened – were woven into the more general alteration described at the beginning of this chapter, whereby personal and social destinies came to depend less on local and inherited resources and connections, and more on distant and publicly available ones, giving new shapes to the economy, politics, and culture, and freeing up the new possibilities in gender relations and morality that began to find realization in the fin-de-siècle. It is by attending to this broad range of transformations, to the common grounds underlying them, and to the benefits and harms, hopes and illusions they fostered, that we can best understand the relationship between modernity and bourgeois life.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 68
