Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age

It is one of the themes of this chapter that the speed with which it was theoretically possible to convey information from place to place—by, say, stagecoach, railroad, telegraph, or telephone—was merely one dimension of a complex social process. In part, this is because the transmission of information involved then—as it does now—not only its conveyance but also its routing. Indeed, for many information users, the speed with which information was transmitted might well have been less valued than its cost and accessibility, and the regularity and reliability with which it was conveyed.