When Old Technologies were New - Marvin

1990

“The point frequently has been made that private dreams are systematic in content and impulse. Dreams and fantasies created, exchanged, and reworked in the public forum are systematic as well. They develop their own traditions in the conversation society has with itself about what it is and ought to be. Such dreams are never pure fantasy, perhaps, since their point of departure is a perceived reality. They reflect conditions people know and live in, and real social stakes.” (P.8)

Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 8.