The most admired feats of the telephone, cinema, electric light, phonograph, and wireless were their wonderful abilities to extend messages effortlessly and instantaneously across time and space and to reproduce live sounds and images without any loss of content, at least by the standards of the day. Experts and publics agreed on the brilliance of this achievement. But wherever these extraordinarily sensitive new nerve nets extended, there was little genuine sense of cultural encounter and exchange. In electrical publications of the late nineteenth century, newly accessible lands and people were seldom cherished for any cross-cultural opportunities they offered, except abstractly. Concretely, they appeared as islands of cultural anomaly that new techniques of communication made available for absorption into the mainstream. Those who controlled the new electrical technologies not infrequently dismissed vastly different cultures as deficient by civilized standards, lacking even the capacity for meaningful communication. What late-nineteenth-century writers in expert technical and popular scientific journals practiced was a species of cognitive imperialism. Theirs were visions of a globe efficiently administered by Anglo-Saxon technology, perhaps with exotic holidays, occasions, and decorations in dress and architecture, perhaps filled with more items and devices than any single person could imagine, but certainly not a world to disturb the fundamental idea of a single best cultural order. What these writers hoped to extend without challenge were self-conceptions that confirmed their dreams of being comfortably at home and perfectly in control of a world at their electric fingertips. Even when, in the Utopian manner, their declared goal was to turn the status quo upside down in pursuit of a better world, few of their schemes failed to reconstitute familiar social orders and frameworks of interpretation. Only the scale of the community in which they imagined themselves as participants had changed. Changes in the functional capabilities of new media of communication were a matter of interested discussion by electrical scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and camp followers. Suggestions that the future of these devices lay in the organization of public intelligence systems to promote cultural harmony and perfection by displaying it to one and all were sympathetically received.
