Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

the substitution of technology and capital for manual labor and management of production.

Minimally skilled laborers gradually and effectively replaced artisans and craftsmen, whose disenfranchisement supported the illusion of disembodied labor, of factories functioning independently of workers’ individual attributes and characteristics. In effect, automation of labor should be considered a technological achievement with each instrumentalized human component made responsive to his or her minimal task but not made fully aware of his or her role in the larger project. The extraction of profit from automated labor enabled the accumulation of capital and the concentration of resources that hastened population swells within British industrial cities. What was made absent from this technical expansion was human labor which involved not only the production of goods and the fulfillment of services but also the creation and perpetuation of human relations, which were concealed and mediated by technical processes.

Within the factory environment, the desire to achieve maximum levels of efficiency and expediency displaced concerns of how automation might merge interpersonal communication and mass communication within a new and emergent technological sphere. New instrumentalized modes of information and communication, such as the printing press and electric telegraph, modified how human knowledge was to be transmitted or received, collected or distributed, altered or perpetuated, validated or denied. Although the possibility of communicating through electric currents was a commonly accepted means of communication in the Victorian era, its availability as a tool for mass consumption and dissemination has been considered highly questionable.

The presence of instrumentalized modes of discourse such as the electric telegraph encroached into the public sphere and