We tend to think of the Internet and the whole mad gallop of accompanying digital change as "the new new thing" - to use the title of Michael Lewis's wonderful and insightful book on Jim Clark of Netscape. The phrase reflects the current Net-enabled economy in which newness is a fleeting concept with such a brief shelf-life that the market is really only interested in new, the newest newness.

Rapid developments in technology and new new ways of using them account for the fastforward pace of the Internet. Like the speeded-up, time-lapse footage of BBC nature documentaries, Internet years race ahead in such a blur that, like dog years, one is the equivalent of seven normal non-digital years.

Some revel in the hyper-accelerated change. Those who grasp its implications, like Mr Clark, reap fortunes as they move from one new new thing to the next, indifferent to the vertigo of spinning in new entrepreneurial directions or of riding roller-coaster market peaks and troughs.

Others, as The New New Thing makes clear, are baffled by it, can't, as the tech jargon goes, "think out of the box", and watch helplessly as the world morphs into something they don't understand. (Swiss and Wall Street bankers in particular, notes Lewis with delicious and witty cruelty. They've had to surrender their long-time position as kings of the investment world to those upstart, hang-loose West Coast venture capitalists.)

For many of those not enamoured of the new new thing and our unprecedented, turbo-charged race into the future, such rapid change has caused anxiety and fear. For some, especially older people who may feel this new world order erupted, unwanted, around them, there's a tangible sense of displacement, of no longer belonging.

Let me quote from another recent book that captures the broad sweep of change introduced by global networking technology: ". . . a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances. . ."

The book goes on: "A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionised business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed over the wires.

"Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates, and dismissed by the sceptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes to everything from news-gathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself."

Except we're not talking about the Internet. Welcome to the Victorian world of the telegraph.

Tom Standage's fascinating history of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, is now out in paperback and should be required reading for anyone interested in - or fearful of - our modern-day version of an international network.

It neatly punctures the self-delusion of every generation, perhaps none more so than those of us in the midst of the microchip revolution, to believe it did everything first and experienced everything first and - ha! - changed the world first.

Most of us can probably remember that gob-smacked feeling of sending our first ever email message - even those of you who are engineers and computer scientists. The very idea of sending off a message at the touch of a key and having it arrive at its destination in an instant, for the cost of at most, a local phone call, seemed miraculous. Yet, we already live in the world of telephones and faxes and radio and television, instant forms of communication and broadcast. Whatever our sense of wonder at first watching a Webpage download, that sense came within an existing technological context. Indeed, we immediately craved greater speed and more bandwidth.

But the telegraph entered a world in which information only travelled as quickly as a ship could sail, a man could walk, a horse could run, a pigeon could fly. As Standage points out, nations sent armies off to war and didn't hear the result of crucial battles until weeks or months later. Companies that traded globally could simply shut down for the summer after dispatching their major shipments across the seas. Investors would buy shares not knowing a company had failed weeks earlier; gamblers could place wagers on horse races that occurred days before because the results remained unknown.

Into this staid, truly humanly-paced world arrived the telegraph and its ability to send information at the speed of an electronic pulse. Almost immediately, traders in the stock market made use of the new network. So did swindlers and conmen (oh, come on, they're not all the same thing).

Businesses were turned topsy-turvy - now they had to be in business, ready to respond to customer and trading partner needs, all the time. Many businesspeople complained bitterly; many businesses failed because they could not adjust.

Whole new worlds of social interaction and business opportunity - new new things - developed around this electronic network that now spanned continents. Entrepreneurs made fortunes by finding ways of moulding daring new business plans around the use of the network. On a more mundane level, many good citizens were appalled that people actually met and flirted over the telegraph. Several people even got married online - a ridiculous stunt, complained moralists.

But read the book. Standage tends to forget sometimes that parallels between the telegraph and Internet are not all that strange - after all, the telegraph and the developments which followed on from it formed our vocabulary and our context for creating and describing the Net, not the other way around. However, that's a small quibble with a marvellous and informative read that places the Net and many of society's reactions to it into perspective. And, it's a useful reminder that the new new thing ain't always all that new.

The New New Thing, Michael Lewis, Hodder & Staughton, £17.99 sterling. The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage, Phoenix, £6.99 sterling.

klillington@irish-times.ie