Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 223.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2024-11-04 19:59:05+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: new book:The Connectivity of Things

Sebastian Giessmann, The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since
1832 (MIT Press, 2024.

Open access, downloadable at:
<https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5866/The-Connectivity-of-
ThingsNetwork-Cultures-since>.

From the MIT Press website:

> A media history of the material and infrastructural features of
> networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time
> into English.
> 
> Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our
> social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent
> object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it
> reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions,
> signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by
> Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the
> overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these
> questions and more.
> 
> Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking turned into a
> veritable cultural technique, Giessmann takes readers below the street
> to the Parisian sewers and to the Suez Canal, into the telephone
> exchanges of Northeast America, and on to the London Underground. His
> brilliant history explains why social networks were discovered late, how
> the rapid rise of mathematical network theory was able to take place,
> how improbable the invention of the internet was, and even what diagrams
> and conspiracy theories have to do with it all. A primer on networking
> as a cultural technique, this translated German classic explains
> everything one ever could wish to know about networks.

--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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