Mobility, Migration and Transport by Colin G. Pooley

Author:Colin G. Pooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319518831
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Virtual Mobilities – keeping in Touch in the Past

Communication and interaction that did not entail physical movement of the parties involved has been important for many centuries, be it by messenger, post, telegraph or over the internet. Of course all these forms of interaction do require the movement of either people (messengers, and postal staff), objects (letters and parcels) or information sent electronically. Although such non-face-to-face interactions are much quicker today (and facilities such as web-cams and Skype allow virtual real-time face-to-face interaction), the principle of needing and valuing the ability to interact without physical movement oneself has been important for much of human history. In this section I briefly examine the ways in which such virtual mobility (interaction without physical movement of the parties involved) has evolved over time and the significance of such mobility for people’s lives.

I have already highlighted the role of migrant letters in conveying information, shaping knowledge of a destination and encouraging chain migration, but for anyone wishing to communicate without travel in the pre-telephone era some form of transferring messages from place to place was the main form of communication. Messages would have been carried from person to person ever since the invention of writing, and Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, described what was effectively a mail service operating in ancient Persia (Herodotus 1921–25). In eighteenth-century Paris there was a well-developed network of messengers and unofficial publications that spread court and political gossip and intrigue in the period before the revolution, a system that Darnton (2000) dubs the ‘early internet’. By the nineteenth century both Europe and America had well-developed postal services that provided a sophisticated technology of mobility, and which enabled people to communicate quickly and easily both within a country and internationally (Daunton 1985; Harcourt 1988; Henkin 2006). In British urban areas the existence of multiple deliveries and speedy transmission meant that it was quite easy to send a message to someone in the morning to arrange a meeting, get a reply a few hours later confirming a time, and to meet later in the afternoon or evening. That such communications worked and were used in this way is illustrated in contemporary literature and can be confirmed from diary evidence. Elizabeth Lee, living near Birkenhead, England, in the late-nineteenth century recorded many such transactions in her diary (Pooley et al. 2010). Letters also continued to be the main method of everyday communication for most people well into the twentieth century, as instanced by the diary of Rhona Little. In her first 17 days in London after arriving from Northern Ireland in 1938 Rhona either wrote or received letters or parcels almost daily.12 Although not as rapid as communications today, postal services (both public and private) have made, and continue to make, a key contribution to human interaction in most parts of the world.

Early telegraph systems were developed from the beginning of the nineteenth century and Standage (1998) has dubbed this technology the ‘Victorian internet’. For most people the higher cost

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