CIAO DATE: 11/2008
March 2006
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
This paper by Jeremy Stolow continues some of the research and discussion in the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition (McMaster University) Working Paper Series about the history of globalization. This history is important because it permits us to assess and understand better what is novel about the contemporary period of globalization and what is more continuous with the past. A critical issue here is the relative importance of contemporary information and communication technologies in reshaping social relations and permitting their global extension in the contemporary period. Professor Stolow's paper reminds us that information and communication technologies began to foster important changes in social relations and in the imagining of these relations already in the nineteenth century. Of particular importance here was the introduction of the telegraph, a technology that permitted much more rapid communication across the world, especially after trans-oceanic cables were laid for its use.
In his paper, he examines the relationship between these technologies and the growth of an important, trans-Atlantic religious movement focused on the spiritual telegraph. He shows that the technology had an important impact on popular culture, leading to its being incorporated into new forms of sociability, particularly religious ones. He adds that these new forms of sociability incorporated ideas related to the telegraph, reshaping in turn religious practices and the range and composition of religious communities. More generally, Stolow suggests, the telegraph was an example of the impact of electricity and its vast potentials for use, its flowing character, and its invisibility on the popular imagination. He reminds us that new technologies are always embedded in particular sets of social relationships and that these relationships, in turn, will change as this incorporation takes place.
Resource link: Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic World of the 19th Century [PDF] - 520K