I suspect that not many of you know exactly who was the world’s first “internet service provider.” Yes, Prodigy or AOL would be excellent guesses, since those two companies dominated the dial-up world of the 1990s. But no, the world’s first such service provider was born in 1791, long before phrases like “internet access” and “digital universe” entered our everyday vocabularies.
Samuel Morse was best known in his lifetime, not as a scientist, but as an artist. A native of New Haven and a Yale graduate, he settled in his hometown and became wildly successful as one of America’s foremost portrait painters. In 1825 he was on assignment in Washington, D.C., where he was painting (of all people) an elderly General Lafayette. One day a messenger arrived at his studio, delivering a letter from his father, informing him that Mrs. Morse was recovering well from an illness. The next day another messenger came bearing grim news: His wife was dead.
The rest, as they say, is history. Overwhelmed by his loss, Morse devoted most of the rest of his life towards discovering something that might be quicker than letters delivered by horseback. The result was the patent he received, in 1847, for the invention of the telegraph, a device that could regularly interrupt an electrical current and thereby send messages hundreds of miles through wires, connecting distant cities as they had never been connected before. He also came up with the notion of giving letters specific current interruptions, giving birth to, yes, the Morse Code.
We’ve come quite a way down the connectivity highway since the mid-nineteenth century. Telegraph begat telephone; telephone begat radio; radio begat television. In the 1980s, the fun really started, when cable tv took center stage and dominated our electronic lives, Memphis magazine devoted a cover story to the subject!
Then came the internet, and thanks to people like Bill Gates and Sergi Blin the world of connectivity has been transformed. As we all now know, the pace of technological change is now measured in decades rather than centuries; can measuring in years and months be far behind?
But a funny thing happened on the way to hyper-connectivity. We’re now not just Memphians; we are citizens of a world where what happens online is oftentimes more “real” than what happens to each of us in our daily lives. I recall a 1970s survey that determined that Americans spent five hours a day watching tv, a report that caused national alarm. What would those alarmists say today if they knew that Americans today devote an average of 10 hours and 39 minutes to screen time, according to a 2016 poll. That’s an average; when do half of them sleep?
To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium is way more than the message these days, especially since hyper-connectivity has now created perhaps the most powerful monopolies of all time. As of June 30 of this year, the top four American public companies in terms of market capitalization were Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Connectivity is king.
King though the internet may be, however, something else is happening all across America. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but Memphis of today is very different from Memphis of 1990. Consider what we have now: Big River Crossing, Crosstown Concourse, farmers’ markets everywhere, a vibrant theatre and arts scene, better restaurants, and ever-more-dynamic neighborhoods? Most importantly, we are a more diverse and less divided community than we perhaps have ever been in our history.
Sure, we still have our problems, raw poverty being foremost among them. But maybe we’re paying more attention to what we have all around us because we spend so much of our time “living” somewhere out there in the ether.
I have to believe that’s the case; for one thing, this magazine has never been more popular (the editor says modestly) and the fact that we share our name with the city we live in, I believe, has a lot to do with that.
We’ve witnessed an incredible rebirth of not just interest, but pride in all things local. The irony seems clear. Convoluted national politics notwithstanding, the Internet Age has had a hand, here in Memphis, in creating a different kind of connectivity, something that must be called a greater connectivity with place.
Kenneth Neill
publisher / editor