Invisible and Instantaneous: Geographies of Media Infrastructure from Pneumatic Tubes to Fiber Optics
Résumé
In the late-1890s, five cities in the United States set up miles of tubing that would send canisters filled with mail sailing from post office to post office, pushed through the length of tube by compressed air. These letters could arrive within the hour and were delivered throughout the day regardless of the constraints of weather or traffic on the streets above. Anticipating our contemporary uses of text messages, the pneumatic mail services offered people the ability to stay in touch throughout the day, coordinating plans or exchanging love notes through an infrastructure that was a key part of defining modern American society. The tubes and the pneumatic mail delivery went defunct in the 1950s; yet, years later, in the early-2000s, a New York entrepreneur came across the archives of these old tube systems and decided to run fiber optic cable from building to building through the now-obsolete tubes. Comparing how these two technologies-pneumatic tubes and fiber optic cables for the Internet-created an imagination of the instantaneous in their respective times, I explore the powerful allure of the instantaneous and how such ideas open up an exploration of the relationship between proximity and everyday temporality as the pace of communications are affected by the desire for ever-accelerating technologies for communication.
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