Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book illuminates and develops the themes of the 2015 film Dreams Rewired, which uses footage from early cinema to tell the story of these tensions. It explores communications breakthroughs from telegraphy to the present, touching on the way that the egalitarian possibilities of recent digital technologies have been rapidly colonised and channelled into patterns of exploitative consumerism that seem set to accelerate. The book focuses on universal languages, by contrast, considers artists and inventors who hoped to build on technological change as a way to overcome rivalries and communicate across cultures. It discusses Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mid-nineteenth-century design for Paddington station. The book examines the failed cable-laying expedition of 1865 as told by William Howard Russell in The Atlantic Telegraph, and reads Russell’s lyrical and abstract account against Robert Dudley’s drawings of the same voyage.