Early Technologies and their Effect on the Perception of Community

Alexander Graham Bell had fallen upon something amazingly different. He had invented a machine that could transmit, over long lengths of wire, voice signals. Users could have actual conversations over these wires. The beauty of the telephone, and something that the telegraph lacked, was that it required no skill to operate. Bell said himself, "... the telephone speaks, and for this reason it can be utilized for nearly every purpose for which speech is employed." Bell also predicted a universal use for his invention, "Wires will unite head offices of telephone companies in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a different place." A general public service for the telephone was then created to "democratize" its use. In 1880, fours years after the invention, 50,000 Americans were telephone subscribers. By 1900, there were three million users and one million miles of wire stretching across the country.

The widespread use of telephones single-handedly created new communities around the world. By allowing someone to talk through a machine and communicate to another thousands of miles away, one's immediate surroundings were redefined.

This explosion of telephony use not only created new communities by expanding an individual's social circle, but also changed the perception of what a community was. Philip Abbot, in his book Seeking Many Inventions expanded on this, saying, "... the telephone as a technological invention certainly radically changed our conception of social space, making social intercourse perpetually imminent."

However, users had to get used to the idea of a "disembodied voice" or voice without a body. Detractors asked why anyone would want to hear a voice without seeing the body. The reason became very clear.

In a similar vein, the advent of radio technology in the early 1900's created a community of its own by bringing together listeners from all parts of the country into a single context. Radio shows created situations that sybolized real-life events and every listener of the show became a part of that. As if in a community, one could relate to the portrayed events as actual happennings.

The emergence of television continued this trend of fictional situations. In the case of the television, sight and sound were merged to give it more mass appeal. Bound to listening to a radio for information, people now had access to a technological innovation that spoke and displayed pictures. Ever since the FCC approved the NTSC standard for television broudcasting in 1954, the "idiot box" has found its place in every American household. Today, on an average evening, about eighty million people in the U.S. are watching television, and has had it on for more than six hours that day, making it the dominant form of social interaction in the last forty years. Stories from across the nation and around the world entered the homes of millions. Television personalities soon became superstars who had the power and public following to influence millions as the television culture was born.

From this point, new communities began to emerge. Viewers began to relate to the fictitious world portrayed on TV as if it was their own. Others who viewed this fake world also became members of this community and a new culture developed.

More recent inventions have served similar purposes. The fax machine was the first truly useful medium for data exchange. A document could be "digitized", converted to an analog signal and then modulated to be able to transmitted along a telephone wire. Employing similar techniques, modems made their on the scene allowing a single computer to interact with another computer or a network. Data communications became and modems which have made data communications a reality. These have helped create communities within the workplace linking together different offices.

Wireless technology has also become a reality with the advent of cellular phones and pagers allowing users to be stray from a confined space in order to remain "connected".

However, there have always been those who viewed this spread of technology as a harmful toward the idea of a community. In 1952 when communication technologies began to gain acceptance in society, Jerome F. Scott and R. P. Lynton stated this viewpoint in their book titled, The Community Factor in Modern Technology:

        "The history of industrialization is the history of increasing wealth. But it is
        also the history of a loss in the sense and value of community. By community we
        mean something larger than a group of people associating for a particular purpose,
        something greater than permanent institution: we mean things shared and held in
        common, the free association and basic understanding, by which people "belong" -
        and from which they gain a sense of function and place amongst their fellow men.
        In that sense, traditional established communities have been disrupted and new
        communities have often failed to grow. Many people no longer have a sense of
        belonging anywhere."

Communication technology has emerged as a medium for fostering interaction between two individuals all the way to creating a medium for mass interaction in the form of the television and radio. Harold Rheingold summed up its enormous contribution, "...The development of electronic communication technologies has essentially abrogated space and time so that we effectively live in a boundless 'global village'."

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