Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.
