Information Nation. - Review - book review

We've been living in a networked society a lot longer than you think.

A Nation Transformed by In formation: How Information Has Shaped the United States From Colonial Times to the Present edited by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada (Oxford University Press, $39.95)

Long before digital cash, America Online or e-mail, Americans were securely zapping news, messages and even money across thousands of miles of forest and prairie by means of a network whose explosive growth quickly made it the world's largest. Like the Internet, it was initiated by the government, and it would eventually change everything. The big difference is that this system -- the once-revered U.S. Postal Service -- was started in the 18th century. It was the first of many networks that would foreshadow the development of the Internet.

Our long history as a networked society is explored in depth in A Nation Transformed by Information, an alternately fascinating and maddening anthology that sets out to show that Americans have lived in something like an information age almost from the country's very beginning.

The book's great strength is the rich historical context it provides for the rise of networked computers, a context so often lacking in contemporary discussions of a networked society and its many implications. The book also excels at exploring the uniquely American factors that have made the U.S. such fertile soil for information technologies of every stripe. Despite some shortcomings, much in this volume should be required reading for anyone involved in an Internet venture.

The story really starts with the Puritans, those zealous newcomers whose belief in universal literacy -- so that everyone could study the Bible -- planted the seeds of informational democracy. That belief flowered in the new American nation thanks to a remarkable postal system, which was nothing like the somnolent bureaucracy that today delivers mostly junk mail. America's crack 19th-century mail service grew out of the Post Office Act of 1792, whereby Congress decreed that newspapers would be carried at rock-bottom prices -- in effect, to be subsidized by commercial correspondence. Thus, by 1838 newspapers accounted for 15 percent of postal revenue but 95 percent of weight.

The U.S. postal system by this time was the world's largest and supported a burgeoning network of stagecoach lines, which themselves formed another crucial early communications network. The U.S. mail was also reliable; long before credit cards and PayPal, "it was by no means uncommon for merchants to send through the mail as much as $10,000 in cash." writes Richard R. John, whose essay is one of the best in the book.

The postal system would set an important pattern for what might be called the American Information Revolution: Each leap forward involved some mix of government action, breakthrough technology, organizational genius, scalability and an almost utopian belief in universal service. As John puts it: "A faith in the emancipatory potential of communications has long been one of the most distinctive, and enduring, of American cultural traits."

The railroads came next, marrying powerful technology to private risk capital. As a result, track mileage rose from less than 5,000 in 1847 to exceed 30,000 in 1860. Railroads soon replaced the stagecoach as a means of delivering the mail, which for almost 80 years was largely sorted inside moving trains.

Most of these railroads were originally laid as single-track lines, the only way to affordably connect so vast a nation in so short a time. Talk about inadequate bandwidth! The only thing that could keep trains from running into one another all the time was an instantaneous electronic communications system. E-mail might have worked, but what they had in those days was the telegraph.

Samuel F. B. Morse's 1844 invention changed more than the railroad system. In America, the rapid transmission of information led directly to the development of future markets and an organization called the Associated Press. People fretted about Western Union's monopoly power, but -- pace IBM - the company took care of the problem itself by declining to buy Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 telephone patent.

One thing that emerges clearly from this book is the government's important role in the success of almost every major information revolution. Sometimes that role is inadvertent: The advent of tax-withholding from paychecks in 1913 helped spur the adoption of adding and calculating machines, for instance. And then there is the military, which recognized radio and radar early on as powerful potential weapons. Since World War II, a staggering 85 percent of all the "R" in R&D expenses has come out of Uncle Sam's wallet.

Several other themes of A Nation Transformed will give modern-day geeks a powerful sense of deja vu. Bandwidth, for example, was a bone of contention in the government's early efforts to allocate radio spectrum, and it also limited coast-to-coast television until 1951, when a nationwide coaxial cable transmission system functioned as an early information superhighway.