The Victorian Internet

Standage tells the history of the electric telegraph as the first global communications network — and in doing so provides an almost uncanny mirror for every claim made about the internet since the 1990s. The telegraph produced its own hype cycles, its own utopian predictions about world peace through connectivity, its own concerns about information overload, its own online romances, and its own financial bubbles. The parallels are not accidental; they reflect something structural about what happens when a new technology compresses the time and space of human communication. Standage is a journalist, not a historian of technology, and the book benefits from that: it reads as narrative rather than thesis. For anyone writing or thinking about digital networks today, this is the genealogy that prevents you from treating the present as unprecedented.