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Just after killing Sun Chuanfang, Shi Jianqiao distributed a poem to witnesses at the crime scene. Shi's obsessive dedication to avenging her father is evident in the first line and the mention of her mother's graying temples conveys her filial dedication to her mother as well. In noting how she was deeply troubled because the retribution had remained unfulfilled for ten years, the poem expresses the urgency of the matter and underscores the intensity of Shi's hunger for revenge. The poem presents filial devotion as the motive that drove Shi to such an extreme act of revenge. In an era of modern communications, Shi Jianqiao managed to tap into the array of cultural and technological resources at her disposal to weave a highly compelling tale of ethical revenge.

This chapter analyzes the field of communication practices in which the systematics constituted. The author focuses on the existing publishing system in systematics and explores the ways in which portrayals of this current practice have been used to open up new innovative possibilities. The chapter also observes that earlier chapters explain the development of modern communication media possibilities and regimes. A discussion on computer-mediated communication and its role in the potential transformation of systematics forms the next part of the chapter. The chapter also analyzes the Taxacom group and its relationship to the communication practices of systematics. It states that communication practices have disciplinary specificity and are significant conduits for the discipline enactment.

This chapter argues that the fluidity of our interactions in modern society makes us particularly vulnerable and requires special attention to the protection of the individual. The battered doctrine of public and private spheres is inadequate for such purposes, and the attempt to apply that doctrine in modern contexts is producing strange and unsatisfying results. With boundaries that are more permeable than ever, individuals need the ability to maintain some type of control in modern communication and information pathways. The more difficult question concerns what type of control is appropriate and how it should be provided. The chapter suggests creating an individual right that can be described as the ability to maintain identity cohesion. Identity cohesion cannot be accomplished under the rubric of either privacy or property protection, or at least not as we have come to understand those protections under the law. Rather, maintaining identity cohesion will require a right that is both more and less than what is granted in the privacy and property regimes.

This chapter traces the trope of conversation as collective voice in modern suffrage fiction. It examines how dialogue, both thematic and formal, works to enhance the public sphere, using as a case study a serialized composite novel The Sturdy Oak (1917), one of the most popular, commercially successful, and aesthetically innovative of modern U.S. suffrage fictions. Edited by Harpers Bazar editor Elizabeth Jordan, the novel contrasts two antidemocratic discourses, the monologic elite abstracting oratory of a rising political star and the more material and more violent working-class dialect of his corrupt political cronies with a more dialogic voice fashioned by modern suffragist characters through their early adoption of more dialogic mass communication forms. This alternative voice of a consolidated, civic-minded middle class is facilitated by suffragists’ expert deployment of the telephone, typewriter, telegraph, newspaper “wire” service, and linotype to foster deliberative discussion in the public sphere. Paradoxically, the novel’s suffragists find political self-expression in the absence of the franchise, not through the individuated self-expression enacted in oratory and privileged by literary histories of modernism but through more modern and more collaborative acoustical and print cultural technologies of voice.

This chapter focuses on the construction of railroads by Americans in Mexico during the administration of Porfirio Díaz. In 1876, Díaz launched an ambitious program of reform and to encourage foreign investments he reduced the chances of insurgency. For the Americans he constructed network of roads and approved railroad concessions that ultimately totalled 8,200,000 acres in rights-of-way and operational zones. The growth of foreign investment and the introduction of modern communications spurred popularity for the Díaz regime during the mid and late 1880s, but the period of optimism proved fleeting after the American railroads failed to prolong prosperity.

This chapter argues that few states have been impacted as much by the Connected Age as North Carolina. North Carolina's twentieth-century economy was built largely on the availability of plentiful low-cost labor. The dramatic opening of world markets and the ability to manage production over wide geographic areas with modern communications and transportation mean that low-cost labor no longer needs to be located in North Carolina or the United States but can be located in China, India, and Eastern Europe. The chapter tells a story of both endings and beginnings—an ending to North Carolina's traditional twentieth-century economy and a beginning to the new Connected Age economy. It tracks broad changes in the state economy and compares them to those at the national level. The chapter documents how North Carolina reacted to the key trends of the Connected Age and shows how these reactions contributed to contractions in traditional industries as well as expansion in new industries.