Human communication

I've been reading about Mother Jones, the famous labor organizer and militant. A book about her imprisonment and trial in West Virginia in 1913 notes the complex networks of communication on which she relied. To get a telegram to the floor of the US Senate, where a debate was being held over whether to set up an investigative committee on conditions in the West Virginia coal fields, she hid messages in the floorboards of her house which were then picked up by sympathizers among the soldiers guarding her. She also convinced her landlady to give her (the landlady's) mother letters to post in a post office less likely to be inhabited by spies.

Human networks did much of the work that we now outsource to technologies.

But technologies don't march in the streets.

Comments

[Alain]

I really appreciate your point. I think you had an essay you were working on a few months back, something like "Whatever Blogging" was the title. I believe your point there was that collectivities, or subjectivities with strong identities, cannot form under the conditions of networked communication. This has been disastrous for our politics. I fear for what is to come in the United States over the next few years.

[Jodi]

You have a great memory!