From Gutenberg to Google notes

44 Highlights | 29 Notes

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 169

The railroad, for instance, was “an unnatural impetus to society,” one journalist concluded, that would “destroy all the relations that exist between man and man, overthrow all mercantile regulation, and create, at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress.”

stay calm

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 252

The visionary behind this idea was a Polish immigrant named Paul Baran.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 301

By one estimate, more books were printed in the first fifty years after Gutenberg’s discovery than had been copied by all the scribes in Europe in the previous thousand years.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 352

Bezos’s Amazon e-reader broke 550 years of precedent by separating the act of publishing from putting ink on paper.

more readers should try the Kindle reader itself

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 359

The canal companies, stagecoach and haulage firms, tavern owners, and others who were bypassed by the speeding railroad used everything from political muscle to vigilantism to derail the iron horse.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 421

That is more than 300 million times faster than the telegraph and 30 billion times faster than horseback.

info incoming

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 427

Giving the user, rather than the network, control to call forth the high-speed information he or she creates or consumes defines the era we are pioneering.

it's a new arrangemen

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 552

This direct-to-the-presses attack on indulgences became Luther’s biggest hit, being reprinted in fourteen editions in 1518 and another eight in 1519–20.16

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 557

In the following two years eighty editions were published throughout Germany.17

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 561

By one account, one-third of all the books printed in Germany from 1518 to 1525 were the product of Martin Luther’s pen.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 630

The idea of seeing the page not in its entirety but as a collection of smaller pieces of information was an intellectual breakthrough in Western thought.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 646

The evolution of medieval underwear helped solve one of Gutenberg’s related problems.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 798

Consumers accessing the newly available books often discovered they were farsighted and needed glasses.

eyesight

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 825

Ultimately, he decreed that anyone who published a book without prior approval would be excommunicated.

Racing at four and a half times the speed of any other conveyance, Tom Thumb was both a marvel and a mystery. The train’s owners and occupants first questioned whether the human body could endure such speed. Many of the passengers on Tom Thumb’s first run were human guinea pigs who brought along paper and pencil to test whether cogent thought was possible at such speed.47

can we stand it?

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1396

In the North, however, the wartime absence from Congress of southern representatives had the benefit of eliminating the opposition that had prevented federal aid to expand the railroad westward.

let's vote now without that oppsistion

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1398

On July 1, 1862, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing a government program to enable the Union Pacific Railroad to build west from the Missouri River and the Central Pacific Railroad to build east from Sacramento to create the first transcontinental railroad.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1543

In many ways Morse’s ignorance acted to his advantage.

ignorance pays

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1817

The technological success of the telegraph failed to drive revenue simply because Americans could not imagine how they could benefit from the breakthrough.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1846

“Try to imagine,” one commentator observed, “the ambivalent anxieties of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in the telegraph office.”

manure and communication

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1931

When the U.S. Army wanted to send a telegram to a distant post they did as everyone else did and sent a clerk with the written message to stand in line at Washington’s central telegraph office.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1935

Eerily, the awakening occurred eighteen years to the day from Samuel Morse’s “What hath God wrought” message. When Confederate general Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson changed the nature of the war by marching to threaten Washington, Lincoln responded by changing the nature of his leadership.

Watson recorded that he “could unmistakably hear the tones of [Bell’s] voice and almost catch a word now and then.”

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1992

Later that evening, Alexander Graham Bell wrote to his father, “I feel that I have at last found the solution of a great problem and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water and gas is, and friends will converse with each other without leaving home.”

Airtime remittances use mobile minutes as a pseudo-currency that can be transferred between phones and exchanged for goods.

Tide detergent or airtime phone credit - new currencies

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2823

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mohamed Yunus has argued, “The quickest way to get rid of poverty is to provide everyone with a mobile phone.”

just keep me posted

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2831

The Soweto laptops were part of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which made available specially constructed and ruggedized computers capable of creating their own wireless mesh network in which each laptop acts as its own send/receive router. Each computer links through the air with the others and ultimately to an internet access point.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2842

While earlier generations of wireless technology evolved from voice to data (just as the wired network had), 5G was the first technology to be built from the ground up for the purpose of microcomputers talking to microcomputers.

5G

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2874

Mobile technology makes it possible to be present without being in attendance.

I'm here but I'm over there

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 3119

You thought you were being sold a television, but it turns out that television is selling you.

tv collects information that can be sold

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 3465

In Estonia, for instance, a citizen can conduct her entire relationship with the government online, including voting.

government online

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 3501

because organizing “anti” is easier than building “pro.”

building is hard

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 3515

CNN may have meant coverage of an approaching storm was news, but today, when everyone is connected, it means everyone is a reporter commenting on and providing thoughts about the storm or any other topic.

One of the logical consequences of uncurated news from social media sources is an expansion of opinion.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3563

With the simple reality that more readers drove higher advertising rates, it became economically wise to offend as few as possible by offering balanced reporting. To maximize appeal to advertisers, therefore, the media attempted to practice objectivity, covering all sides of a topic and muting personal opinion so as to repel as few as possible.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3580

During the Roman Empire and earlier, news was a “social media” activity “in which information passe[d] horizontally from one person to another along social networks, rather than being delivered vertically from an impersonal central source.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3585

This time, however, there has emerged a new kind of digital gatekeeper with a new economic incentive that is often in conflict with the desire for information veracity.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 4045

It was at one such event, on a spring evening in Washington, D.C., that, after more than an hour of spirited discussion, I observed how our conversation had not touched on any of the topics with which the participants were involved. Instead, we had been pursuing philosophical and theological themes.