Carey, the Telegraph, digital time and the voice of energy

I loved this reading, because I think that Carey points out an important historical, social and economic moment that should be common knowledge, or at least taught more in schools, and that is is how our current system of time zones and coordinated timing of trains (and the stock market thereafter, most likely) came into being. According to our reading today is the anniversary of the first time people in the USA conceptualized the nation continentally in four time zones by matching major city clocks across these zones. I like how Carey writes about the telegraph as having such far reaching consequences in narrative style and human speech, in changing human thought to understand the possibility of instantaneous communication over a long distance. It probably isn't a coincidence either that when I type in "telegraph" into Google's search engine, the first item that appears in my browser window is a link to the UK newspaper, the Telegraph.

My father has worked for decades in the telecom industry and he spent his early career as an electrical engineer at Bell Labs before deregulation. I never tire of telling people how proud I am of his work- he was involved in the research and development of early frequency control devices, oscillators made first of quartz and later silicon, that control digital devices by stabilizing their electrical signals. In essence they act as clocks for digital devices, controlling the stream of 1s and 0s in our iPhones and computers, amongst other more sophisticated electronic devices and machines. I am (obviously) too young to remember the telegraph but I do remember early telephones developed by AT&T for consumer use that enabled people to see the person they were speaking to on a small screen above the keypad. I thought these machines were revelatory at age 7, and so did the people at the AT&T convention we attended, but consumers never wanted to buy $1000 telephones even if they could see their friends and distant relatives on them. Perhaps the 'transaction costs' were too high. Now, we have virtual teleconferencing capabilities and telepresence technologies that make use of the Internet, though the costs of these media is still prohibitive to some extent to the mass market (at least in the latter technology.)

I'm going to end this post by citing the lyrics to The Voice of Energy, a lesser known song/speech through vocoder by one of my favorite music groups, Kraftwerk. I have always been a fan of their playful yet obsessive engagement with technology, electricity, electronics, and communication. Carey says this, tangentially, and I agree- changes to synchronous/instantaneous communication technology depended largely on controlled manipulation of electricity, which dates back to the late 19th century- quite recent! Back to Kraftwerk, though- I think that their continued use of metaphors linking humans to machines is appropriate to our discussion here and also to Carey's notion of discourses of electricity and religious ideology:

Kraftwerk
 - The Voice Of Energy

Hier spricht die Stimme der Energie

Ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer Generator

Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft

Und ermoegliche es Ihnen Sprache, Musik und Bild

Durch den Aether auszusenden und zu empfangen

Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich

Deshalb huetet mich gut
 Mich, den Genius der Energie
***

This is the Voice of Energy

I am a giant electrical generator

I supply you with light and power

And I enable you to receive Speech,
Music and Image through the Ether

I am your servant and lord at the same time

Therefore guard me well

Me, the genius of Energy