Speed of communication rose by up to ten billion in two centuries

Evidence

The narrative of acceleration in this case is also well-documented and familiar: from “marathon runners” through horse-riding messengers, smoke signals, and mail pigeons to telegraphs and telephones and finally to the, in the truest sense of the word, u-topian, space-less Internet, where pieces of information lose their location and can be transmitted at the speed of light. In the course of this development it was not just the speed of message transmission but also the quantity transmittable per unit of time (in a particular medium) that continuously grew. This “transmission revolution” comes a bit later chronologically than the “transport revolution” and appears to be in various respects a reaction to the latter. According to Karlheinz Geißler’s estimate, in the twentieth century alone the speed of communication increased by a factor of 107; Francis Heylighen even calculates the increase during the last two hundred years to be a factor of 1010. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 251

Categorization

• CANDY: A ten-billion-fold growth in communication speed in two hundred years is a memorable cocktail-party number.
• XREF: connects to: Social media diffused far faster than any earlier major technology — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 378; Mechanised communication is the bedrock of modern cultural globalisation — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 191

Broader Connections

• Social media diffused far faster than any earlier major technology #qualifies (0.75) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 378
• Mechanised communication is the bedrock of modern cultural globalisation #expands (0.70) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 191