The Connectivity of Things

Network Cultures since 1832

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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.

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CC BY-NC-NDThis book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND). You can download the ebook The Connectivity of Things for free.

Title
The Connectivity of Things
Subtitle
Network Cultures since 1832
Publisher
Author(s)
Published
2024-10-15
Edition
1
Format
eBook (pdf, epub, mobi)
Pages
444
Language
English
ISBN-10
0262550741
ISBN-13
9780262381093
License
CC BY-NC-ND
Book Homepage
Free eBook, Errata, Code, Solutions, etc.
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