Non-Fiction Steampunk

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TheVictorianInternetThe histories of Tom Standage approach familiar things from unfamiliar angles. Being interested in Steampunk, and a daily user of the internet who has trouble recalling what life was like before then, I found The Victorian Internet fascinating. Subtitled The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers, the story of the wiring of the world did resonate in any almost eerie way to the early days of the world-wide web. Despite my disclaimer, I do recall those days clearly when the only way someone could get in touch with you immediately was the telephone, and you had to be at home for it to work. Prior to the telegraph, news traveled even slower and you could go months without hearing from those closest to you, if they happened to be away. Samuel F. B. Morse knew that first-hand, as Standage tells it. His wife died while he was out of town, and although he rushed back right away upon hearing, she had been buried before he reached her. Such was life when news arrived only by letter. Morse was among those who invented the telegraph, a device that made the world realize that yes, it was possible to send information to distant places almost instantly. It soon become a wired world.

Standage is also more circumspect than some writers who declare, with breathless awe, that some new device will cure the world’s ills. Showing how the telegraph generated much the same hyperbole as the internet (that peace would reign now that people could communicate instantly, that technology had brought a miraculous rapprochement, etc.) he notes that people remained people. Wars continued—intensified, in fact, into World War One where technology was devoted to destruction. People had always been able to kill each other. Now they could do it faster, and in more hideous ways. Still, there’s no denying that once the idea of instant communication caught on that we would continue to develop it rapidly. You never need be away from a network that covers much of the developed world and you can talk on your phone from deep under the Hudson River to the top of the Empire State Building. You can order a pizza from anywhere.

Ironically, Morse dedicated part of his earnings to endow a lectureship concerning how science related to the Bible. It was clear that technology had achieved the impossible (okay, well, the improbable) and yet, Victorian society still relied on the truths contained in Scripture. The telegraph, which began with the words, “What hath God wrought,” ended with the attempt to figure out how the Bible fit into all this. Just because humans had crossed the great barriers of oceans with electric cables didn’t mean the Almighty was out of a job. Even today God can be found on the internet. Along with many other choices of distraction and business. God is not so much dead as commodified. The difference between Morse’s day and ours was that then they knew that the Bible impacted daily life. It continues to do so today, but we’ve become too sophisticated to give it much of a nod. We might be well served, however, to look back once in a while as well as to look forward. We might be surprised at how little things have changed.

Ancient History

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Every great once in a while somebody in the popular media seems to remember suddenly that the ancient world existed. I suppose that it is the fate of forward-looking species to forget the past, at least until it looks trendy. An editor for Sunday’s paper, for example, ran an article by Tom Standage, “Facebook, Twitter: That’s all so 1st century B.C.,” written originally for the Los Angeles Times. Tom Standage has written popular histories that go back to the Sumerians; I really enjoyed his A History of the World in Six Glasses. He’s got a great grasp of antiquity. In this short article, Standage points out similarities between modern, electronic social media and the distribution of gossip in ancient times. Indeed, he is basically right about writing: as soon as people learned to do it, it proliferated. Communication at a distance is such a wonder that we seldom pause to consider just how revolutionary it is. Social media has just made it that much easier. Instant thoughts, at the speed of light. Anywhere in the wired world. And yet…

SolomonFakeNot having been trained properly in journalism, I don’t know how newspaper articles are designed. People, I know, don’t like huge blocks of text without some visual candy. To illustrate Standage’s article is a close-up photo of some funky paleo-Hebrew letters with this caption: “Were ancient stone tablets, like this one detailing repair plans for the Jewish Temple of King Solomon, part of early social media networks?” I may be obsolete in the scholarly world, but I instantly recognized this inscription. It was “discovered” and rapidly disseminated in 2003. Almost immediately it was clearly demonstrated to have been a forgery. Scholars nowhere accept this as an authentic artifact. Even those of us who last saw this a decade ago know that it’s fake. Social media, indeed? Somebody in the design department needs to read their ancient history.

What is so striking about this faux pas is that most well-meaning readers have no way of assessing or ascertaining the validity of such an image. Oh, the script is cool, no doubt about that—but the artifact is fake. To answer the question posed by the caption: no, this is not ancient social media. It is a modern hoax. People are susceptible to hoaxes because of two factors: TMI and P. T. Barnum. Too Much Information exists for anyone to stay on top of it all. For progress to occur we need to rely on experts on the past to clear the way for us. Phineas Taylor Barnum knew how to turn any cheap scam into instant cash. It is no surprise that Solomon’s inscription first appeared on the antiquities market, certainly with an eye for cashing in on the success of the recently promoted James Ossuary, the one where someone much later added the phrase, “the brother of Jesus.” I’m sure that Tom Standage was in no way involved in the choice of image for the reprint of his article in our local paper. It does, however, suggest an old message that will even fit on your Twitter character limit: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”