Quote of the Day
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Why it matters
Thoreau saw the social media question coming in 1854. The line is from the first chapter, titled “Economy,” of his 1854 book Walden, where he reflects on rapid technological progress and modern inventions.
Just before this remark, he writes that “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Speed, he suggests, is no guarantee that there is anything worth saying: “As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.”
Right after the Maine-to-Texas sentence, he turns to a transatlantic crossing: “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
Written about the telegraph and railroads, the passage still reads as a caution about later networks — the internet, smartphones, and social media — and as a reminder to put meaningful thought above constant connectivity. The surrounding sentences are quoted from the Project Gutenberg text of Walden (ebook #205; see also Walden on Wikipedia).