Information Nation: We've been living in a networked society a lot longer than you think.

The Industry Standard, Jan 15, 2001, by Daniel Akst

A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United 
States From Colonial Times to the Present edited by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and 
James W. Cortada (Oxford University Press, $39.95)

     Long before digital cash, America Online or e-mail, Americans were securely 
zapping news, messages and even money across thousands of miles of forest and 
prairie by means of a network whose explosive growth quickly made it the world's 
largest. Like the Internet, it was initiated by the government, and it would 
eventually change everything. The big difference is that this system -- the 
once-revered U.S. Postal Service -- was started in the 18th century. It was the 
first of many networks that would foreshadow the development of the Internet.
Our long history as a networked society is explored in depth in A Nation 
Transformed by Information, an alternately fascinating and maddening anthology 
that sets out to show that Americans have lived in something like an information 
age almost from the country's very beginning.

The book's great strength is the rich historical context it provides for the 
rise of networked computers, a context so often lacking in contemporary 
discussions of a networked society and its many implications. The book also 
excels at exploring the uniquely American factors that have made the U.S. such 
fertile soil for information technologies of every stripe. Despite some 
shortcomings, much in this volume should be required reading for anyone involved 
in an Internet venture.

The story really starts with the Puritans, those zealous newcomers whose belief 
in universal literacy -- so that everyone could study the Bible -- planted the 
seeds of informational democracy. That belief flowered in the new American 
nation thanks to a remarkable postal system, which was nothing like the 
somnolent bureaucracy that today delivers mostly junk mail. America's crack 
19th-century mail service grew out of the Post Office Act of 1792, whereby 
Congress decreed that newspapers would be carried at rock-bottom prices -- in 
effect, to be subsidized by commercial correspondence. Thus, by 1838 newspapers 
accounted for 15 percent of postal revenue but 95 percent of weight.

The U.S. postal system by this time was the world's largest and supported a 
burgeoning network of stagecoach lines, which themselves formed another crucial 
early communications network. The U.S. mail was also reliable; long before 
credit cards and PayPal, "it was by no means uncommon for merchants to send 
through the mail as much as $10,000 in cash." writes Richard R. John, whose 
essay is one of the best in the book.

The postal system would set an important pattern for what might be called the 
American Information Revolution: Each leap forward involved some mix of 
government action, breakthrough technology, organizational genius, scalability 
and an almost utopian belief in universal service. As John puts it: "A faith in 
the emancipatory potential of communications has long been one of the most 
distinctive, and enduring, of American cultural traits."

The railroads came next, marrying powerful technology to private risk capital. 
As a result, track mileage rose from less than 5,000 in 1847 to exceed 30,000 in 
1860. Railroads soon replaced the stagecoach as a means of delivering the mail, 
which for almost 80 years was largely sorted inside moving trains.
Most of these railroads were originally laid as single-track lines, the only way 
to affordably connect so vast a nation in so short a time. Talk about inadequate 
bandwidth! The only thing that could keep trains from running into one another 
all the time was an instantaneous electronic communications system. E-mail might 
have worked, but what they had in those days was the telegraph.
Samuel F. B. Morse's 1844 invention changed more than the railroad system. In 
America, the rapid transmission of information led directly to the development 
of future markets and an organization called the Associated Press. People 
fretted about Western Union's monopoly power, but -- pace IBM - the company took 
care of the problem itself by declining to buy Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 
telephone patent.

One thing that emerges clearly from this book is the government's important role 
in the success of almost every major information revolution. Sometimes that role 
is inadvertent: The advent of tax-withholding from paychecks in 1913 helped spur 
the adoption of adding and calculating machines, for instance. And then there is 
the military, which recognized radio and radar early on as powerful potential 
weapons. Since World War II, a staggering 85 percent of all the "R" in R&D 
expenses has come out of Uncle Sam's wallet.

Several other themes of A Nation Transformed will give modern-day geeks a 
powerful sense of deja vu. Bandwidth, for example, was a bone of contention in 
the government's early efforts to allocate radio spectrum, and it also limited 
coast-to-coast television until 1951, when a nationwide coaxial cable 
transmission system functioned as an early information superhighway.
Then there was the role of amateurs. Long before Silicon Valley's Home Brew 
nerds ever got hold of an Osborne, early amateurs operating crystal sets 
pioneered the new medium of radio. Other parallels include the role of antitrust 
enforcement (and the fear thereof), the importance of standards (for everything 
from railroad gauges to color TV to personal computers) and the almost unfailing 
short-sightedness of American newspapers.

Perhaps the most consistent theme is the willingness of Americans to embrace 
innovations that make information more cheaply, readily and palatably available. 
Even information technology meltdowns are nothing new. After all, the nation's 
first telephone company (a direct ancestor of AT&T) almost went bust, too.
Unfortunately, A Nation Transformed was written by a committee of narratively 
challenged professors, a couple of whom would be hard-pressed to write a 
compelling suicide note. As a result, whole chapters cry out to be skipped. In 
spite of such failings, this is one of the most important new books anyone in 
the information racket can read.

Daniel Akst (akstd@yahoo.com) is an author and book critic who writes frequently 
about business and technology.