Twitter = Morse Code?

My students this semester had been asking if I had been following the History Channel's new series, America: The Story of Us (clever little pun, no?). I had not, what with the excitement of the basketball and baseball seasons. Nevertheless, I'm catching up now, and quite pleased for the most part. Was taken with a couple of early, foreshadowing insights. Perhaps a little too presentism to say how the Committees of Correspondance and the U.S. Post Office was a prehistoric Internet. I will agree with one of the comments that every advancement in America was fueled by a technological change (I won't go as far as to make a direct link from the card-punch looms of Lowell, Mass., to Silicon Valley - yes, literally).

In e Civil War episode, I had to reach for my iPad when they narrator described Morse Code and it's impact on the war with the phrase "ideal for brief messages, like Twitter today, it needs just seconds to send them and transcribe them."

Timeout. Did you really just:

A) Date this series with a tech reference that will sound worse than all those 1950s "Land of Tommorow" cartoons.

B) Seriously compare the first true, time compressing technology to a 140 character chat box toy of the Internet age.

Well, yes. And, yes.

As a history prof, good luck using that episode in classrooms without snickering in a few years. (As the Friendster of its day . . . ).

But the more I think about the telegraph reference, the more I found it apt. In it's best real-time reporting ability, the Western Union was the means of news transmission, filling the time between military information in this era and railroad traffic as we move forward into the great transcontinental roads. Could you imagine the Iran crisis without it; the Haitian earthquake?

The one big difference - by the skilled nature of the telegraph operator (and as a ham operator who struggled to surpass his own Morse code test) made it an essentially elite communications tool. Twitter, and other packet oriented simple text communication tools, once installed, are incredibly democratic and open as to who can use them.