Abstract
In “When the Medium was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture,” Jenna Supp-Montgomerie draws from her expertise in religion and communication to study the underpinnings of technological innovations. She focuses on the Atlantic telegraph cable laid in the 19th century, submitting that “the first telegrams were more liturgy than information, more ritual than transmission of content” (1). Supp-Montgomerie investigates the malleability of religion that underpins the history that “has shaped media, engendering grand hopes of worldwide unity, and its legacy in obscuring the important activity of disconnection,” without which networks as we know them could not operate (xi). She argues that the cultural and religious imagination of the time played a significant role in shaping the way networks (railroads, telegraph systems, nerves, societies) were understood and valued (79). Supp-Montgomerie traces how the telegraph was perceived not just as a tool for communication but as part of a divine mission to connect the world, revealing the religious narratives’ “missionary logic” (44) that influenced the rise of network culture.
The book argues that religious ideas about unity (US utopianism) and salvation encapsulated in both the promises and failures of communication and divine connectivity infused public discourse about the telegraph, framing it as a medium that would bring about global harmony. Supp-Montgomerie argues, “Connection and disconnection worked through each other in tense tandems, dyadic tropes that played on paradox and impossibility; a whole world created by important forms of exclusion and the promise of proximity to people adamantly characterized as strangers” (63). Indeed, among the different “telegraphs” at play in 1958 according to Supp-Montgomerie, “the spiritual telegraph depended most heavily on the receptivity of its human operators, rather than the reliability of wires and machines” (81). By examining several religious moments, such as the lived experience of the Oneida community and other popular events/discourses of the 19th Century that gave birth to the material infrastructure of network technology, Supp-Montgomerie shows how the telegraph’s advent was not simply a technological achievement, but a moment deeply intertwined with religious aspirations for human connectivity and divine purpose.
A critical reflection might question whether Supp-Montgomerie’s focus on religious narratives and undertones risks marginalizing other equally influential factors—political and economic—that played a vital role in shaping both the telegraph and the emergence of network culture. However, the resurgence of religious nationalism in the US and across the world today is proof of the malleability of religion and its influential force field on everything it infuses. True to Supp-Montgomerie’s claim, “Scholarship on religion and media has often looked to media content or media practices. . . to find religious work” when in fact it is religion that is “active in most technological and material aspects of a medium” (167). This opens a broader inquiry into how religious forces have continued to shape technological developments because, in fact, as Supp-Montgomerie asserts, “Religion was adamantly woven into the warp and weft of these webs of cables: it pushed Morse’s machine around the world, fuelled and framed nationalist enthusiasm for global communication, and crafted telegraphy as the herald of a perfect future” (173).
This work invites us to reconsider the modern-day networked world as intertwined. “The imaginaries of salvific networks in the nineteenth century and of the destructive network in the twenty-first, however, are not separate” (203), suggesting that its roots lie not only in technical progress but also in spiritual and religious aspirations for unity and transcendence through communication. This prompts scholars to shift from lamenting the decline of religion in America to asking, “Where does it dwell now?” The old roots reveal much about the “new trends.” It is important to recognize the malleability of religion, especially in this age of networks.