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TECHNOLOGIES are social constructions. Machines are not like meteors that come unbidden from outside and have an "impact." Rather, human beings make many choices when inventing, marketing, and using a new device. The telephone and telegraph, the early forms of networked communication, provide an essential background for understanding the computer network. The choices made by inventors, entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers created the networked society. This society did not have a preordained form, contrary to the determinists,1 whether they be pessimists (Ellul, 1964; Meyrowitz, 1985), or optimists (Gingrich, 1995; Negroponte, 1995). I find Langdon Winner's argument more convincing: autonomous technology is an ideology, which can and should be resisted (Winner, 1977, p. 335). A close reading of history, rather than post hoc ergo Procter hoc analysis, shows that human beings choose which machines they will use and how they will use them. Fernand Braudel, the great historian and author of Capitalism and Material Life, reflected on how slowly some societies adopted new machines, and declared, "Technology is only an instrument and man does not always know how to use it" (Braudel, 1973, p. 274). And even after people know how to use a technology, they can integrate it into a society in many ways (Bijker, et al., 1987, 1992). The telegraph is a case in point.
Conceived and patented by Samuel F B. Morse, the telegraph astounded observers in 1838. Incredulity brought excited crowds to demonstrations and the first telegraph offices often provided seating for the public, who could scarcely believe that it was possible to sever language from human presence (Czitrom,1982, pp. 4-8). Twenty years after its invention, when thousands of miles of lines linked the states, the New York Times declared that, "The Telegraph undoubtedly ranks foremost among that series of mighty discoveries that have gone to subjugate matter under the domain of mind" (August 9, 1858).
But we should not write history backwards, assuming that inventors knew what was to come. They are quite commonly uncertain or wrong about how their devices will be used. Thomas Edison thought the chief use of his phonograph would be to record speech, not music (Conot, 1979, pp. 246-47). Morse did not fully understand the enormous commercial potential of his telegraph, and he tried to sell it...