Epilogue
The telegraph wove its way across the ocean at a time when religion’s role in public life was commonplace. Since then, networks have become more vital to everyday life in easily perceptible ways while religion is considered a less overt part of so-called secular public culture in the United States. The epilogue proposes that the relationship of telegraphic networks to the networks that shape our world today is not causal or continuous but one of resonance in which some elements are amplified and some are damped. The protestant dreams for the telegraph in the nineteenth century—particularly the promise of global unity, the celebration of unprecedented speed and ubiquity, and the fantasy of friction-free communication—reverberate in dreams for the internet and social media today. In cries that the internet makes us all neighbors reverberates the electric pulse of the celebrations of the 1858 cable’s capacity to unite the world in Christian community. And yet, it is not a straight shot from then to now. Some elements have faded, particularly overt religious motifs in imaginaries of technology. The original power of public protestantism in the first network imaginaries continues to resonate today in the primacy of connection.