Alexander Williams

“The telephone may offer a better parallel to the internet than the telegraph, since the phone became a popular medium in a way the telegraph never matched. Invented in 1876, the telephone is just as “Victorian” as the telegraph, but I prefer the term “Gilded Age Internet,” both because I’m most interested in the American story and because for me, “Gilded Age” emphasizes a political as well as cultural context for technological change, which Standage’s book, like everything written about the internet in the 1990s, largely overlooked.”