Is the Internet Really New After All? The Determinants of Telecommunications Diffusion in Historical Perspective

Recent anxieties over the digital divide have centered on the observation that uptake of the internet is shaped by a number of identifiable, place-based factors. Yet is the internet any more a product of material geography than previous communication technologies? Our contribution in the present article seeks to address this question by deploying quantitative techniques to examine whether the country-level adoption of past communication networks – mail, telegrams and telephone – was shaped by similar socioeconomic factors. Our results reveal striking similarities in the domestic attributes – income, education and trade openness – influencing rates of uptake across all four technologies during their major periods of diffusion