The Beginnings of Digital Culture - Digital Culture - page 16

the nineteenth-century beginnings of the 'Information Society',
commonly supposed to be a more recent phenomenon.
The combination of railway and telegraph was also an important
component of the beginnings of modern commodity capitalism.
Increased communications both encouraged the growth of markets,
and changed the nature of those markets. In the United States in
particular, the telegraph, along with the railroad, enabled a radical
shift from local markets' conditions of supply and demand to
national markets', in which the price of goods responded to national
conditions. As James Cary points out, the telegraph evened out
markets in space, and placed everyone in the same place for
purposes of trade, thus making geography irrelevant. 18 In effect
the telegraph was responsible for the development of widespread
futures trading, trading in time, rather than arbitrage or geograph-
ical price differences. But in order for such a condition to be
realized other conditions needed to change. According to Cary 'the
development of futures trading depended on the ability to trade
or circulate negotiable instruments independently of the actual
physical movement of goods.' 19 What was traded was information
rather than actual products. To begin with this meant the ware-
house receipts from grain elevators along the railroad line, which
were traded instead of the grain itself. In order to facilitate this kind
of trade, products had to be standardized and homogenized so that
they could be bought and sold without inspection. Cary continues
to suggest that this process of divorcing the receipt from the product
can be thought of as 'part of a general process initiated by the use of
money . . . the progressive divorce of the signifier from the signified,
a process in which the world of signifiers progressively overwhelms
and moves independently of real material objects'. 20
Other methods of allowing signs to circulate were developed at
the same time, including photography. Jonathan Crary points out
that the photograph was the most significant, in terms of cultural
and social impact, of the 'new field of serially produced objects' that