Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
"I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.
"Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:
"Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian Period”."
Sound familiar?
That's the key line there. A more highly connected world, intermediated electrically.
> the story is particularly noteworthy as a prediction of massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks, written at a time when computing was in its infancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe
Btw it's resurfaces on Hacker News every now and then:
Edit: yes 1 to many communications existed but they either required expensive publishing or they were tied to a physical location (eg a physical notice board). Internet forums are globally available for anyone who is interested to read or publish and that turns out to be phenomenally powerful but in a way that pre-internet people could not have conceived of
“So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…”
It was Innis who'd first drawn the connection between medium and tenor / characteristics of communication. See especially Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication.
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
This is naive of me -I had never considered that there were physical message boards with replies being tacked onto the original message.
Though the OG is probably E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909).
(Animats beat me to that by 3 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546)
No one predicted me writing to you from an elevator in Hong Kong and having the speed of interaction under a few milliseconds. And now that I Skype my dad across the ocean, it seems like a very secondary and minor feature of the internet.
Whatsapp alone changed how we interact with far away family as if we never left.