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In the 1850s submarine telegraph cables started to transgress the seas and to link the United Kingdom with the rest of the world. While such cable-laying efforts concentrated on Europe and the European seas in the early years, the establishment of a transatlantic connection and of a direct telegraph route to India soon became primary goals of British telecommunication policy. After several failed attempts a working transatlantic cable was put into place in 1865. Already a year earlier the last stretch of cable to (more or less) directly connect India with the United Kingdom had successfully been laid in the Persian Gulf. In the year 1870 this patch-work connection was replaced by a more efficient cable from Suez to Bombay bringing the Indian subcontinent in unprecedented reach of Whitehall.
Both the United Kingdom and India were, thus, integrated into an emerging global telecommunication network. However, the communicators at both ends of the communication route have not been equal in their access to or control of the Euro-Asian flow of information. It seems to be clear that technically control and agency rested mainly with administrators and merchants in the United Kingdom (or, more specifically, London), while the South Asian end remained comparatively passive in the communication process for a long time. As Headrick has impressively shown, the emerging global telegraph network of the late nineteenth century has been one of several seminal ‘tools of empire’ for the British. Unsurprisingly, its initial structure and use reflected the imperial centre-periphery dichotomy, and an asymmetrical pattern of information flow and control was established.
Today, such asymmetrical global connectivity patterns still exist. In political and academic debate they are usually referred to as the ‘global digital divide’. Every so often, studies dealing with the issue mainly style the ‘digital divide’ as global differences in the distribution of computers, access to the internet or the rate of mobile telephones per head. While this can be a first indicator as to a region’s position in the global information network, it is the uneven control over and access to the flow of information that really separates the two sides of the divide. As can be seen in Figure 1, the flow of digital information between Europe and North America amounted to almost three times of that between North America and Asia in the year 2004. Africa and Latin America exhibit even lower connectivity rates. This huge difference in information flows becomes even more pronounced when we take Asia’s high population numbers into account. From a per-head perspective, Asia’s share in global digital communication is marginal, and the transatlantic connection between Europe and North America is by far the most important telecommunication route of the day.
- Figure 1: Interregional Internet Bandwidth 2004
Source: Telegeography (www.telegeography.com)
It seems that today’s ‘digital divide’ resembles the asymmetrical pattern of the nineteenth-century telecommunication network in both structure and actual information flow. The comparison of two network maps can serve as an example to illustrate this. If one puts, say, a map of the global submarine telegraph network of the year 1901 or of 1924 next to the only recently released Submarine Cable Map 2007, it becomes obvious that the overall structure of the information network has changed only marginally in the past 100 years. With the very notable exception of the economic boom regions of East and South-East Asia, the two spatial representations are practically alike. The same world regions stand at the centre of the network and feature an extremely high connectivity, while other regions remained at the fringes of the net and have not been able to utilize the technological advances of the twentieth century to place themselves more centrally. Even the main routes and pathways of information flow have changed but little and in a number of cases the landing sites of today’s fibre optical cables are still located at the very same places at which the submarine telegraph cables of the nineteenth century emerged from the sea. This supports the point that the evolution of the global information network has been shaped by a surprising degree of continuity both in its structure as well as in its usage patterns.
- Figure 2: Eastern Telegraph Network 1901
Source: Atlantic Cable Collection (www.atlantic-cable.com)
- Figure 3: Submarine Cable Network 2007
Source: Telegeography (www.telegeography.com)
We find hints at a similar importance of continuity in the development of telecommunication structures in regional or national contexts as well. I have recently tried to show how the United Kingdom (and especially its capital London) has managed to maintain its position at the core of a global telecommunication network since the middle of the nineteenth century despite its relegation from world power to secondary geopolitical and economic importance. Here we can find continuities in a number of different contexts: in the position of the UK in the imperial/global information network; in London’s position in the latter; in London’s position within the UK domestic network; and finally in the uneven distribution of global connectivity within the metropolis.
This supports the notion that path-dependence played a significant role in the development of modern informational structures and usage patterns. While it is well-known that path-dependence is an important and recurring factor in the historical evolution of many technologies, a path-dependent approach to the history of ‘informationalization’ runs counter most common assumptions about ‘information societies’. In particular, it would challenge the notion that information technologies and their infrastructural networks are highly dynamic and evolve largely without historical baggage.
However, despite such obvious continuities in global connectivity patterns, South and South-East Asia have produced many an ‘informational’ success story as well during the last decades. The by now archetypical region around Indian Bangalore has emerged as an information technological hotbed. South Korea and Taiwan are among the best-connected countries of the world today. And Malaysia has invested heavily in IT research conglomerates and universities. At present it is unsure whether these are indicators for a slow but gradual ‘informationalization’ of parts of Asia or whether we are only dealing with isolated and hardly sustainable developments. The already mentioned Submarine Cable Map 2007 reflects to a certain degree the ‘wiring’ of East and South-East Asia, while the South Asian cable connections largely resemble nineteenth-century structures. The experiment of Bangalore seems to remain an isolated attempt at joining the ‘information age’ amidst an agriculturally and industrially organized society.
For the moment it appears as if the old imperial dichotomy that informed the rationale of the global telegraph network has perpetuated itself into the twenty-first century. A massive integration gap still separates South Asia and Europe in terms of global information access and information production – despite the widespread (but slightly naive) assumption that the technological advances of the twentieth century will eventually level all informational differences and elevate everyone into the ‘information age’ (see Nicholas Negroponte’s problem-ridden One Laptop Per Child policy).
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