"We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character"
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Lodge is doing a sly thing here: he takes what sounds like a neutral observation about “communication” and quietly smuggles in a hard limit on human certainty. A physicist talking, yes, but also a man living in an era newly intoxicated by mediation - telegraphy, radio, the microphone, the laboratory instrument that promised to extend the senses. His point is not merely that messages degrade. It’s that the channel is never innocent.
The phrase “unconscious but inevitable” is the tell. Lodge isn’t blaming bad operators or faulty wiring; he’s arguing that distortion is structural, baked into the very apparatus that makes transmission possible. Communication, in this view, is always a negotiation with interference. “Hampered” is an unsentimental verb: progress doesn’t eliminate friction, it just changes the form it takes. Then he widens the indictment by pairing “mechanical” with “physiological.” The medium isn’t only cables and coils; it’s also nerves, ears, attention, memory - the body as hardware. That move collapses the boundary between technology and perception, inviting the unsettling implication that even face-to-face understanding is “largely determined” by constraints we don’t notice while they’re operating.
Contextually, Lodge sits at the seam between Victorian physics and the modern information age, when scientists were beginning to formalize noise, signal, and measurement error. The subtext reads almost like an early blueprint for later media theory: before you argue about what a message means, audit the machinery that allows it to appear at all.
The phrase “unconscious but inevitable” is the tell. Lodge isn’t blaming bad operators or faulty wiring; he’s arguing that distortion is structural, baked into the very apparatus that makes transmission possible. Communication, in this view, is always a negotiation with interference. “Hampered” is an unsentimental verb: progress doesn’t eliminate friction, it just changes the form it takes. Then he widens the indictment by pairing “mechanical” with “physiological.” The medium isn’t only cables and coils; it’s also nerves, ears, attention, memory - the body as hardware. That move collapses the boundary between technology and perception, inviting the unsettling implication that even face-to-face understanding is “largely determined” by constraints we don’t notice while they’re operating.
Contextually, Lodge sits at the seam between Victorian physics and the modern information age, when scientists were beginning to formalize noise, signal, and measurement error. The subtext reads almost like an early blueprint for later media theory: before you argue about what a message means, audit the machinery that allows it to appear at all.
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| Topic | Technology |
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