ABSTRACT
One of the sure signs that a technology has transformed society is that people begin to treat it as part of the landscape. Carol Sheriff ’s (1997) recent reappraisal of the impact of the Erie Canal on antebellum America, for example, shows that within a decade of its completion users stopped marveling at the canal’s low cost and breathtaking 5 m.p.h. speed and turned to debating how to cope with its impoverished workforce and its disruptions of traditional property rights. What once had overcome nature soon became part of nature. Similarly, Tom Standage (1998) shows in his book The Victorian Internet how the world’s first electronically mediated communications tool (the telegraph) was created in controversy but became ubiquitous. Promoted in utopian terms by its backers and dismissed as cumbersome or useless by its critics, over time it proved essential to news and commerce. The ultimate sign of its success was that it did the right things but did not do them well enough. Within two generations inventors had outmoded it with the telephone and radio, not as a rejection or abandonment of the concept but rather as a testimony to its powerful collaborative potential.
