A brief history of telecommunications and its relation to spiritualism and supernatural. The early development of telegraph that is to be said in relations to spiritualism. the idea of transmutable communications and body as media as well in spiritualism. It's interesting to read about how female voices comes through in spiritualism but what is more interesting is the theory of eletromagnetic field that can channel through some supernatural world through human body (especially female), while I find the mentioning of body can ultimately be diffused like particles and pass through physical barriers is surprisingly similar to Buddhism meditation, the medium of body and the medium of telegraph is some how channeled together forming telekinetic powers.
When radio is invented it became more obvious the contradiction and paradox of meat body and transmitted voices, you can hear about disaster from another country but have noway to interfere or influenced by it in a material space. To fill in this separation of body and space there is even instructions of how to "interact" with the radio machine by holding hands and touching the machine. Radio waves becomes something like a technical sublime information ocean that has overwhelming voices that it is difficult to hear really anything. The concept of mass distribution and controlled information starts to occur in radio and early television as well.
Where mass media becomes the constant interruption of everyday life. The medium of TV has also the pictorial power that radio didn't have, the ability to create a completely virtual other world, another form of supernatural perhaps. The switching between different channels is almost like a syndrome of schizophrenic, where no real meaning can be left or remembered, The Hyperreal images that mimics the real ones are feedback to the viewers, the virtual and real has lost its boundaries in a post-modern concept. The doppelgängers that are in tv starts to replace the real. The concept of simultaneity in this case is also key element across the history of telecommunications, The realtime transmutable that becomes part of our tools as our body as medium becomes the networks' own tools as well.
Internet in this case not only has simultaneity, but abstracts time and space even more, there is not just a stream of schizophrenic consciousness flowing, there is also the uncanny feeling of the undead, the eternity, by the invention of clouds. the dependancy of internet by human is also stronger than ever where almost every thing is managed by internet such as banking and different kinds of official use, meaning the boundaries of human as medium and internet as medium are more blurry, where net neutrality is losing day by the the function of internet as mass media will have stronger approach than TV and Radio as well. The question is what is the next medium for unheard voices?