Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about. The printed word helped make our thought linear and abstract and vastly increased our artificial memory. Newspapers shrank the world; then the telegraph shrank it even further, producing a practically teleportational shift in the world of information. With every innovation, cultural prophets bickered over whether we were facing a technological apocalypse or utopia. Depending on which Victorian-age pundit you asked, the telegraph was either going to usher in a connected era of world peace or drown us in idiotic trivia. Neither was quite right, of course, yet neither was quite wrong. - https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101638712