- Your current position:
- Research >
- B: Public Spheres >
- B9 Information Flows >
- Introduction
Print this Page. Send this Page.
Introduction
Transcultural flows – no matter if they encompass concepts, institutions or practices – need a medium or vehicle that links the cultures at the ends of the process. Such vehicles can come in different forms: as migrating humans, as traded goods or as passed-on information. For most of human history, information flows accompanied flows of people or goods, but in the nineteenth century we witness the so-called ‘dematerialization’ of telecommunication which detaches the movement of information from that of ‘material’ people or commodities. Electric telegraphy is one of the first technologies to allow such ‘dematerialized’ communication over large distances.
- Figure 1: The Eighth Wonder of the World - The Atlantic Cable
Source: Atlantic Cable Collection (www.atlantic-cable.com)
In the course of the nineteenth century, a global telegraph network emerges as a new vehicle for transcultural contact and interaction. It works along a different rationale than its predecessors. Constraints of time and space lose much of their importance in global communication, while access to the communication network is initially very exclusive and prohibitively expensive. The new system employs specialized codes and signs. It is geared to serve European scripts and languages. Access to the system requires special skills and the existence of a specially trained group of operators. In addition, telegraphy introduces artificial limits on the length and content of communicated messages.
It seems reasonably clear that all this profoundly changed the nature of global information flows in the nineteenth century and accordingly transformed the structural conditions within which an important part of global transcultural interaction has taken place. Talking about the flows and exchanges between South Asia and Europe, it has generally been assumed that the imperial ‘centre’ in the United Kingdom gained even more importance and influence over the ‘periphery’ thanks to the new rationale of telecommunication. But this assumption builds on a very superficial examination of the new global network only and does not acknowledge the existence of different forms of ‘centrality’ and ‘connectivity’. It also ignores how European-developed information technologies have been locally adopted and adapted in South Asia and used to very different ends.
Therefore, the Junior Research Group seeks to find out:
- how exactly the emergence of a global telegraph network altered the structural and content-related preconditions for transcultural flows between South Asia and Europe
- how imperial centralism and local strategies of adoption and adaptation interacted in this context and how asymmetrical the resulting flow patterns were
- if and how such imperial, asymmetrical patterns perpetuated themselves in still reverberate in modern-day global networks
