Telegrams vs. Twitter: How Instant Messaging Hasn’t Changed Much
Or, How We Continue to Mistake Speed for Progress While Saying the Same Things in Fewer Words
Look upon the modern world, dear reader, and behold its latest triumph of communication! With a mere flick of the thumb, words can now traverse oceans in an instant, reaching eyes and ears across the world in the blink of an eye. Political debates, personal affairs, declarations of war, public spectacles—all now take place on screens, in real time, with a ceaseless, unrelenting immediacy.
And yet, I must ask: Has anything truly changed?
Oh yes, they call it Twitter, or whatever absurd name it has been rebranded to this week. They call it instant messaging, social media, digital discourse! And yet, strip away the glowing screens and the intrusive advertising algorithms, and what do we find?
The telegram.
Yes, dear reader, today’s ceaseless chatter is but a reincarnation of that most venerable of 19th-century marvels: the telegraph, the original harbinger of instant communication, the first device that allowed humanity to send short, concise messages across vast distances with unprecedented speed.
And much like today’s Twitter, the telegram was hailed as a technological miracle that would forever alter human civilization.
Spoiler alert: it did not.
So let us embark upon yet another grand unraveling of modern arrogance, as we trace the path from telegrams to Twitter, revealing that instant messaging has never been about enlightenment, but rather about who can say the most with the least amount of effort.
Act I: The First Age of Instant Messaging—The Telegram (1840s–1900s)
The mid-19th century was an age of galloping industrial ambition, an era in which the great minds of science and commerce sought to tame time itself. The telegraph, that electrified marvel, made this dream a reality.
For the first time in history, words were freed from the constraints of physical travel. No longer did one need to wait days or weeks for letters to cross the ocean—now, with a series of precisely timed electrical pulses, a message could be delivered instantly.
The result? Pandemonium.
News organizations rejoiced! No longer bound by sluggish postal systems, they could now report events mere moments after they occurred—often without the inconvenience of verifying whether they were true.
Politicians and world leaders discovered that they could now send urgent instructions to their diplomats and generals, allowing them to mismanage crises faster than ever before.
Ordinary citizens, for the first time, had access to short-form communication, allowing them to send brief but dramatic missives such as:
“ARRIVING TUESDAY. STOP.”
“MOTHER ILL. COME AT ONCE. STOP.”
“HAVE BOUGHT HORSE. REGRET IMMEDIATELY. STOP.”
The world had entered a new era of communication, one in which messages were faster, but not necessarily better.
For what did the telegraph do? It compressed language, forcing people to express themselves in short bursts, stripping messages of nuance, humor, and grace, reducing entire conversations to a handful of disjointed, urgent proclamations.
Does this sound familiar?
It should.
Act II: The Rise of the Telegram Culture—Abbreviated Rage and the Collapse of Patience
With the spread of telegrams came a cultural shift—one that mirrors, with almost comical precision, the digital discourse of today.
Newspapers became obsessed with speed, competing to publish breaking news telegrams before their rivals, accuracy be damned.
Diplomatic incidents escalated rapidly, as world leaders sent short, abrupt messages that were often misinterpreted, leading to avoidable hostilities.
The public became addicted to brevity, abandoning the elegance of letters in favor of quick, blunt exchanges.
It was, in every way, the first social media platform.
And then, much like today, people began to lament what had been lost.
Novels and essays bemoaned the death of long-form thought, declaring that the telegraph had made people impatient, reactive, and prone to misunderstanding. Writers mourned that the age of eloquent correspondence was over—no one wrote letters anymore; they simply blurted things out in telegrams and called it conversation.
But of course, humanity, in its infinite stubbornness, did not learn from this lesson.
For the telegram did not disappear—it merely transformed.
Act III: The Digital Telegram—Twitter and the Curse of 280 Characters
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and behold! The telegraph has been reborn, except now it is called Twitter.
Once again, the world has embraced brevity as progress, believing that the ability to broadcast short, instant messages to the world is a great and glorious achievement.
Once again, we see:
News organizations sacrificing accuracy for speed, churning out “breaking news” without pausing to verify if it is true.
Politicians and world leaders igniting diplomatic disasters, firing off hasty, ill-advised tweets without a second thought.
Public discourse descending into madness, as people attempt to discuss complex social, economic, and philosophical issues in 280 characters or less.
If the telegraph was a loaded pistol, Twitter is a fully automatic machine gun—capable of spreading outrage, misinformation, and impulsive nonsense at speeds that the 19th-century telegram operators could only dream of.
And yet, for all its speed, for all its reach, for all its technological sophistication, Twitter—like the telegram before it—has failed to make people wiser, kinder, or more thoughtful.
It has merely made them faster at missing the point.
Act IV: The Future—Will We Learn, or Will We Repeat the Cycle?
So, dear reader, I must ask: where does this leave us?
Are we, like our telegram-obsessed ancestors, destined to live and die by the brevity of our own impatience? Or shall we, by some miracle, rediscover the value of long-form thought, deliberate communication, and the lost art of taking one’s time?
If history is any indication, we shall continue on our current path—until, one day, someone “invents” a new way of sending short, instant messages, calls it revolutionary, and convinces the world that it has never been done before.
And then, once again, we shall act shocked when it all plays out exactly the same way.
For the truth is this: instant messaging has never changed.
The only difference is that now, instead of sending telegrams, we send tweets.
Instead of paying per word, we trade in outrage.
And instead of ending our messages with "STOP", we simply hit send without thinking.
The result? The same as before.
Nothing has changed—except, perhaps, the speed at which we miscommunicate.