As a form of media, the telephone most resembled the one-to-one networks of the postal service. In the age of mass media that would follow, new communications platforms would be inevitably drawn toward the model of big-media creators and a passive audience of consumers. The telephone system would be the one model for more intimate—one-to-one, not one-to-many—communications until e-mail arrived a hundred years later. The telephone’s consequences were immense and multifarious. International calls brought the world closer together, though the threads connecting us were thin until recently. The
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