Introduction

Yuvral Noah Hariri, author of the 2011 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, argues that one of the single biggest differentiators between humans and all other mammals is our ability to tell stories. Storytelling is what enabled our dominance as a species.

If he’s right, that means that telecommunications technology is directly correlated to human endeavour. The better the technology, the further your story can spread, and the greater your audience.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the advent of a line-of-sight semaphore telegraph system by a Frenchman, Claude Chappe, coincided with Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. Using le systeme Chappe, messages sent from Paris could reach the outer fringes of the country in a matter of three or four hours; before, it had taken despatch riders on horseback a similar number of days.

In the 1840s and ,50s, electronic telegraphy – with stations set up along the new railway lines – began to take over. The telegraph was the first technology in history that allowed for a ‘story’ to be told over a distance beyond the reach of smoke signals, drums or signal poles.

South Africa’s apartheid government of the 1980s felt that access to telecommunications was access to power, which is why the state-owned fixed-line (‘landline’) operator was directed to limit phones in townships to no more than one per 100,000 people.

Many people take for granted unfettered communications but no one would have heard of the Tunisian vendor Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight in 2010 in protest against injustice in his country, if someone hadn’t taken a video and shared it via social media. No telecommunications = no sharing = no revolution.

The consequent Arab Spring – the series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Islamic world – is attributed to Egyptian revolutionaries organising rallies via social media, so much so that the state ordered mobile operators to shut down their networks. In response to the lack of information, many took to the streets to find out what was going on. In this way, the impact of the shutdown had the opposite effect to what the government had intended, as many people left their homes to acquire information and subsequently joined the protests. Take away a people’s connectivity and they’ll topple you.

Companies like Amazon and Takealot have revolutionised shopping, metaphorically bulldozing out of existence sometimes centuries-old bricks-and-mortar retailers. Uber and Lyft have revolutionised public transport, creating employment opportunities for tens of thousands of drivers who were historically locked out of mason-like industries. And here in South Africa new-age media company Daily Maverick used leaked email troves to expose corruption at the highest levels of government.

But with the good comes the bad. Child pornography is on the rise. Fake news is skewing election results. The dark web makes it easy to buy drugs and guns. Neo-nazis and neo-liberals are finding it easier to connect, with sometimes disastrous consequences.

For better or worse, however, telecommunications technology will continue to advance. Stories will be told faster and to more people. And if Hariri is right, that means humankind’s dominance of the planet will continue to grow.

If we’re to not abuse the dominance, we must know where we’re going. And to know where we’re going, we must first know where we came from. Hence, this book.

By understanding the history of telecommunications, perhaps we can better understand the future.

Alan Knott-Craig

Stellenbosch, South Africa