How Technology Has Changed Our Society In The 19th Century

There’s no denying that technology has changed our society drastically in the past century. Today we are more connected than ever before. From the invention of email and the first mobile phone the way we connect and communicate keeps changing and expanding. According to Pew Research Center a nonpartisan fact tank that conducts public online polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research, as of January 2014, 90% of adults in America owned a cell phone. In addition as of September 2014, 71% of online adults had a Facebook (Pew Research Center). Technology has also given us a global reach in terms of who we can talk to. Nowadays a girl from South Korea can call a boy in France, and a Moroccan

Historically the earliest method of long distance communication was written letters. The invention of the telegraph in the 19th century allowed messages to be delivered over a long distance far faster than written letter and was a revolutionary way to convey news and information. Since then communication technology has rapidly evolved. According to Mashable a leading global media company that informs the digital generation by the mid 1980s government and military employees, students, and academic professionals were common email users. Today approximately 294 billion emails are sent daily more messages than could have been delivered by hand or translated through a telegraph (Mashable). Although the majority of emails are business related, email allows us to communicate with anybody across the globe and for various reasons including pleasure and advertising (BBC). E-mailing isn’t the only invention to have changed communication in modern society. Cell-phones have become pivotal in our culture and have also changed the way we communicate. Early on cell-phones were mainly used in the business world like e-mailing, but as they developed they began to include more features and became more accessible to the general public. Today cell-phones are a part of our daily lives and have become central to the average american’s daily communication. The Cellular Telephone Industries association, an international industry trade group representing all wireless communication sectors including cellular, personal communication services and enhanced specialized mobile radio, states that in 2012 Americans sent 69,000 texts every second (CTIA). Cell-phones allow us to communicate even faster than e-mails to anybody with cell-phone service. Cell-phones and e-mailing has allowed the average person to communicate across the globe and much quicker than we could have