“What hath God wrought?” Those words were uttered by Samuel Morse in 1844 when the first telegraphic line was set up. The inventor of the telegraph saw the telegraph as a blessing from God.
The invention of the telegraph was a massive technological leap. Prior to the telegraph, communication and transportation were linked. Information was carried by people on foot, by horse, or ship. It took time to spread information. This linking had been the case from the time of the most ancient peoples to 1844.
With the invention of the telegraph, information could be transmitted in an instant by wire. For instance in rowing races held at Poughkeepsie, New York to determine the team that would go to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, a man was ready at the telegraph to announce to the world the outcome of the races. Instant communication of this sort was viewed as miraculous at that time, but we being accustomed to seeing events around the world in real time see this as almost quaint.
“We are one!” recounted the poem “The Victory,” giving tribute to the telegraph’s inventor, Samuel Morse. Morse’s machine annihilated time and space by allowing information to be transmitted in seconds. Anticipating how the technology could produce a new “global village,” Morse wrote, “. . . the whole surface of this country would be channeled for those nerves which are diffuse, with great speed and thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring through the whole land; making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.” Up until this time few people actually wanted or even needed to know all that was occurring in the land. Nevertheless, the telegraph invited a new type of public conversation that provided information with little or no context” (The Vanishing Word, by Arthur W. Hunt III, p.128).
“This was a new way of perceiving the world—taking it all in whole. Of course, one cannot take the whole world at one time. . . Information, then, became a commodity, a package of fragments and discontinuities of far-off worlds, made to be sold every single day as “news.”
Every day we receive news from all around the world on our TV’s, our radios, our computers, our cell phones, and our IPads. The challenge is there are times when it is overwhelming.
We can probably all remember 9/11/2001 as pictures of planes flying into the Twin Towers were broadcast to the world. It was shocking to see the planes crash into the building and smoke boil out of the building. Our horror was magnified as first one building collapsed and then the other. The event and the images greatly impacted America in 2001, but we are 14 years further along the road of history and there a new images that bombard us daily. Riots, beheadings, natural disasters, inventions, sports to name a few all come our way.
Communication and the images that accompany them flow without ceasing unless we choose to shut the flow off. Our ability to shut out the world from Friday sunset to Saturday at sunset is a precious blessing that God has given us. The Sabbath gives a chance to put “the news” that really matters into perspective. We know that the “news” that really matters is the Good News of the coming kingdom of God. Each Sabbath provides us a time to be refreshed with God’s truth so that as we venture back out into a technologically advanced world we can keep it all in the proper perspective.
Enjoy the Sabbath,
Gary Smith
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