“Victorian internet”

I found this great quote in an article on literacy in the Economist:

Literacy may be under attack from electronic media, but that’s actually nothing new. In fact, the assault on the written word began not with the Macintosh computer in 1984, but with Samuel Morse’s demonstration of the telegraph in 1844—an innovation a colleague on The Economist insists, quite correctly, on calling the “Victorian internet”.

The article itself is very interesting.