During the 1920’s, astonishing inventions such as the gas-powered car and Edison’s phonograph captured the public’s imagination about what technology could do. Suddenly, “communicating with spirits didn’t seem much more impossible than harnessing electricity“. Both Thomas Edison and Thomas Watson, assistant to telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, experimented (separately) with building a “spirit phone” to connect with the dead. Inventors and the public eventually realized that the dead don’t answer, preferring the caller to leave a voicemail, and the idea of communicating with spirits via telephone died. But this disconnect between what we imagine technology can do and the actual limitations of technology is theme that continues to baffle us, as shown in the comic below.
Elizabeth Losh highlighted some of the aspects of this disconnect at her recent talk at a FemTechNet conference. In the case of the spirit phone, the “material vs. transcendent” dichotomy is the most relevant. When people could suddenly converse hundreds of miles away over the telephone using this new, non-tangible force called “electricity”, it seemed just as conceivable that a spirit could physically exist as micro-particles. Telephone users in the early twentieth century didn’t understand the physics of electricity and of phones like we do today. As magical as a telephone seems, a phone functions because of material reasons, like wiring and microphones. As we mentioned in class, saving files to the cloud generates a similar confusion today about “material vs. transcendent”. While the user may think their files go to some literal, intangible “cloud”, the files are actually stored at a remote server farm. While it seems the amount of storage is limitless, you could eventually run out of your allotted space in your cloud, forcing you to delete some fire selfies.