The Connectivity of Things

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.Contents
1   Getting Caught Up
2   Six Strata of Network History: Genealogy of a Cultural Technique
3   An Archive of Networking
4   Channels: Politics of Networking around 1850
5   Exchanges: Telephones and Voices around 1890
6   A Visual History of the Network Diagrams (I): From the Visual Models of the Natural Sciences to the Calculation of Social Networks
7   Transportation: Map, Network, and Synchronization around 1930
8   A Visual History of the Network Diagram (II): Network Projects and the Material Culture of Capitalism
9   Network Protocols: Architectures of Computers and Communication around 1970
10   A Visual History of the Network Diagram (III): Economic Entanglements and the Mediology of Conspiracy
11   The Connectivity of Things
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Index“A thoughtfully crafted history of past and possible future networks.”
—Choice

“The Connectivity of Things is valuable not just as a genealogy of networking practices but also as a theoretical demonstration: What happens when we stop viewing networks as interconnected bunches of roads or wires and instead focus on the practices of interconnection that transform those roads and wires into coherent systems?”
—Information & Culture“From fishing nets to the London Tube map, telephones to network protocols, this fascinating book mines diverse historical episodes to highlight the changing materiality, culture, and practices of networks.” 
—JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita, MIT Sloan School of Management
 
“Behold the much-anticipated history and theory of networks. Giessmann has penned a deeply philosophical and beautifully written media history of how the modern world became so intricately, and perilously, webbed. A triumph!”
—Benjamin Peters, Hazel Rogers Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Tulsa; coeditor of Your Computer is on Fire; author of How Not to Network a Nation
 
“The Connectivity of Things is as expansive and capacious as a network, drawing together technologies and social forms, spatiality and temporality, language and images—an essential text for network historians.”
—Nicole Starosielski, Professor, University of California, Berkeley; author of The Undersea Network and Media Hot and ColdSebastian Giessmann is Reader in Media Theory at the University of Siegen. He is Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project “Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization” with the collaborative research center Media of Cooperation.