Neil Postman reminded us that the advent of the telegraph, with its radically truncated economy of prose, created a whole new language—that of headlines: “sensational, fragmented, impersonal.” Postman blamed the telegraph for introducing us to this choppy, discontinuous method of learning that things happen, often far away, with no clear way of making sense of them or weighing their relative importance to our lives or future. “To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
I turn to the 'Telegraph's' obituaries page with trepidation.
Obviously, 'Lincoln' is not about the telegraph operator. There's a whole other movie before and after the two isolated scenes that I'm in.
