Internet revolution
Published on 28 October 2024
After Peterloo (1819) the Stamp Act of 1712 was extended to all publications which sold for less than six pence, at this time the impost was 4 pence. A typical wage would have been around 14 shillings a week so roughly 15% of your daily income was paid in tax if you wanted to read a newspaper. Not even the middle-class could afford this. One way in which they stayed abreast of the news was by subscribing to newsrooms, communally pooling their funds with other subscribers so that publications could be bought and read together. These newsrooms might also offer one-time entry for a fee.
It wasn’t just the repressive taxes on knowledge that made newspapers expensive, printing was expensive and paper was still made of old rags; the advent of cheap paper from wood pulping occurred later in the century. As newspapers became cheaper, their strategy shifted to cutting prices and then using the resultant mass-circulation to generate advertising revenue. It was this business model which ultimately was wrecked by the arrival of internet advertising, as the rivers of gold from classifieds dried up.
Fast forward to the 20th century. Radio and later television are blamed for dumbing down of the public. Broadcast spectra are naturally limited. If you do pay a lot of money for the license to broadcast, you now have a strong commercial imperative to make money by maximising audience share – i.e. by focusing on entertainment instead of the dissemination of information. Moreover because broadcast spectra were a public resource, governments stepped in with heavy-handed regulation which further reduced what was permissible to be broadcast.
Then there’s the nature of the media themselves. E.g. radio was often listened to in a passive manner, so broadcasts could not be too cognitively demanding. A housewife going about her domestic duties might only hear excerpts here and there, so the broadcast must be engaging on a moment-to-moment basis – it could not slowly build a story or idea up in a linear manner like text. And of course, audio media tend to be more engaging with music, sound-effects, etc. none of which lend themselves to the transmission of ideas.
TV had similar issues, except was also a visual medium. I won’t bore the reader by continuing to relay basic media theory but hopefully one catches my drift.
At the inception of the world wide web, many futurists envisioned it leading to an intellectual golden-age. Now anyone could publish anything, at ~0 marginal cost, effectively allowing an infinite diversity of publications. Even better, the internet was a two-way medium; everyone could participate. This was contrast with newspapers, radio and TV where the audience is just a passive receptacle for a centralised transmission. The closest analogue to this in history was perhaps the epistolatory culture that flourished in the late 19th century, although this was only private communication.
This many-to-many relationship meant that the internet could not only replace print and broadcast media, but in principle could replace conferences, civic meetings, and other forms of association which traditionally needed to be done in person.
Needless to say, this hasn’t come to pass. The 4 billion internet users today haven’t been able to create so much as a decent discussion forum. If anything, our time is more intellectually sterile than any time in modern history. As a result, most cultural critics concluded that the nature of the internet was mischaracterised early on given that the predictions were so off-the-mark.
Here I finally come to my point: I think the futurists were right. The internet is an infinitely better communication technology than anything that has come before, it has only failed to live up to its promise because there is something profoundly wrong with the population. The masses are unable to engage with ideas, have no interest in the society they live in and generally display a sort of bovine apathy.
The proof here is in the original passage. Fleet Street was healthier in the early 19th century, despite incredible economic obstacles, than anything today. It had a greater diversity of publications and ideas and the quality of writing was better. There is no good explanation for this viewed through the lens of communication technologies. It was plausible prior to the internet to blame technology, given the shortcomings of TV and radio, but in hindsight it looks like those media were scapegoated for the stupefaction of the population that was due to other secular trends. Now that we have the internet, and those trends continue unabated, it effectively demonstrates that technology wasn’t ever driving these phenomena.
I’d go further and suggest the repression of association (e.g. the combinations acts, the seditious meetings act, etc.) and the media (the aforementioned stamps act, seditious libel act, etc.) were to some extent a proportionate response to the intellectual ferment of the times. The relative absence of modern censorship is not due to the benevolence of today’s rulers so much as the ideational infecundity of modern man. Pitt the Younger would be a libertarian today safe in the knowledge that the masses can’t think or organise themselves.
If, somehow, the internet had been gifted to the early 19th century British (or Germans, French, Americans), there’s no doubt in my mind it would have far-better fulfilled the original prophesies. Indeed it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t have led to a series of revolutions, quite apart from greatly accelerating the development of science and the arts. This should be obvious to anyone who reads history closely, although no-one does today, being too busy taking pictures of their food or making dance TikToks.
Looking ahead, it seems obvious that the internet will move from being principally a textual medium (which it was due to bandwidth constraints) to an audiovisual one. Already I’ve noted that emails are rapidly being replaced with teams meetings at work. As should be clear from above, I think this is a symptom of the problem rather than the cause. People can’t think, ergo they can’t write, and this despite the fact these people grew up with media that emphasized text (emails, internet chat, SMS). As such as I expect the early internet was a swan-song for textual communication, even if the population was unable to take advantage of it.