>Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly not a ponderous essay you can mull over.
Which is beside the point, since the parent talks of a pre-telegraph terse text culture, not a telegraph one.
>And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of information?
No, the idea is that there was deeper involvement into the available information -- instead of always skimming it, which ends up not delving enough into anything.
>It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look to the past.
It's even more dangerous to think of history as a kind of monotonic progress across all sectors (as opposed to just the technological one).
Which is beside the point, since the parent talks of a pre-telegraph terse text culture, not a telegraph one.
>And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of information?
No, the idea is that there was deeper involvement into the available information -- instead of always skimming it, which ends up not delving enough into anything.
>It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look to the past.
It's even more dangerous to think of history as a kind of monotonic progress across all sectors (as opposed to just the technological one).