book
The Victorian Internet
Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet. New York: Walker & Company, 1998.
Why this matters here
Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet recounts how nineteenth-century telegraphy forced extreme brevity because each additional word cost money, leaving receivers to reconstruct missing connective tissue. How Meaning Moves extends that compression structure to ordinary text messages that preserve words while stripping much of the setting that gives them weight. Standage establishes telegraph communication practice and economics; the book asks how everyday compression becomes competing stories about what a message meant.
