This week’s image from The Connectivity of Things is a colonialist map. It was published as a fold-out part of Prosper Enfantin’s 1843 book Colonisation de l’Algérie. In this treatise, the Saint-Simonian cult leader Enfantin was upfront about the strategic placement of settlements and settlers in Algeria. While the early socialist movement of Saint-Simonians movement had started with utopian dreams of a new networked unity of orient and occident in the 1830s, this map deliberately drew a reséau de soumission –– a network of colonial submission and police power.
Chapter 3 of the book is focused on theory and heuristics of writing network history in „An Archive of Networking.“ Yet, this map features prominently in chapter 4 of the book. It is called „Channels: The Politics of Networking around 1850,“ and it deals with the ambivalent history of network ideology and practice in early socialism. There’s not just a breathtaking colonial history to be told here –– which includes the Suez Canal –– but also one of early feminism, romanticism and social engineering. I’ll come back to the Saint-Simoniennes and Saint-Simoniens next week.
Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie. Engraving by L. Bouffard, lithograph by Joseph Lemercier, 1843. 49.5 cm × 66.5 cm. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
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.
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English.
ANT was a blast when it reached Media Studies. Its methodology, however, was based on a mediating “Connectivity of Things” that could be mobilized but hardly historicized. So how do we re-engage with research on networks as cultural technique to create joint future(s) of STS and Media Studies?
Actor-network theory heuristics and methodology have traveled quite a bit outside of STS. Media Studies, in its differing styles of thought, is a case in point. Within my contribution, I am going to contextualize a still recent constellation between ANT and German Media Studies. How did crucial elements of the French anthropology of technology (Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Georges Haudricourt, Gilbert Simondon) become a common ground for both actor-network theory and the Germanophone research on cultural techniques? What can be learnt for future STS network methodologies from intertwining ANT with Media Studies of cultural techniques?
From the vantage point of cultural techniques, ANT might have lacked a critical, historicizing perspective on its own foundations and mode of operation. It generalized Leroi-Gourhan’s operational chains into sociotechnical networks. Yet programmatic initiatives for historicizing and criticizing networks were not wanting—for instance, Michel Serres’s ”History of Scientific Thought” or Bruno Latour’s ”We Have Never Been Modern.” But for ANT, everything that could be described analytically as a network (or “worknet”) qualified as an actual network. Claims were bolstered by the self-evidence of the lifeworld (and academic practice) of the 1980s and 1990s. ANT could only come about because of the flourishing sociotechnical networks of the day. In contrast, subsequent, more historically oriented studies of cultural techniques—and of the history of infrastructure and science, technology, and society—demonstrate reserve by stressing the material grounding of networks, their metonymic character, situatedness, and specificity. Networks have genealogies within a “Connectivity of Things,” but they are not themselves genealogies.
„Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.“ This quote on the MIT Press website is an excellent motto for this provocative collection.
I am very glad to co-host the European book launch of YOUR COMPUTER IS ON FIRE together with Armin Beverungen. Feel free to join us on April 28, 7pm CET, via Zoom! Please register via email at cdcforum [/at/] leuphana.de for videoconferencing details. And yes, this is a joint event of Siegen University’s CRC „Media of Cooperation“ and Leuphana University’s „Centre for Digital Cultures“ .
Am ersten Oktober 1970 fiel die politische Entscheidung, kein gesamtsowjetisches Computernetzwerk aufzubauen. Die Geschichte dieses „InterNjet“ ist mittlerweile aus den USA heraus rekonstruiert worden, u.a. von Slava Gerovitch und Ben Peters. In Deutschland sind die sowjetischen Netzwerkprojekte und ihre Protagonisten Anatolij Kitov und Wiktor Gluschkow nur wenigen bekannt.
Mein Artikel zum 50-jährigen Nicht-Jubiläum ist heute in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung erschienen (30. September, S. N4, online bei faz.net). Die US-amerikanischen Arpanet-Entwicklungen hatten bereits im letzten Jahr ihren 50. Geburtstag. Im kommenden Siegener Seminar Medienkulturen des Kalten Krieges: „The Americans“ werden die digitalen Medientechnologien und kybernetischen Infrastrukturen auf – und zwischen – beiden Seiten des Eisernen Vorhangs analysiert.
Karte des Einheitlichen Staatlichen Netzwerks von Rechenzentren EGSVT, Plan für das Jahr 1990. Datiert auf 1964 in Peters, Ben: How Not To Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, Cambridge, MA/London 2016, S. 112.
Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates the World Wide Web to delegates at the Hypertext 1991 conference in San Antonio, Texas [CERN-IT-9112021-01]
Based on historical case studies focused on media and data practices,
the project reconstructs the co-operative creation of networked media
since 1989. From a media-historical perspective, it aims to provide a
contribution to the European and transatlantic history of the Internet
and the World Wide Web. From a media-theoretical perspective, the
project aims to develop and specify a concept of digitality that takes
into account its cooperative emergence, its infrastructural
maintenance, universalization, and its specific publics.
We thereby focus on the constitutive role of a) interchangeability of representations and the growth of digital systems, b) cooperative production of interoperability and modularity, and c) elementary practices of reading, writing and algorithmic control. The three work packages of the project explore
the constitution of the World Wide Web via its situated work constitution (Gießmann, Schüttpelz, Taha, Volmar),
the development of intranets using the example of German corporate networks (Taha) and
the emergence and spread of IP-based real-time communication via instant messaging (Volmar).
We assume that the establishment of the Internet and especially the
World Wide Web as a public general-purpose infrastructure has lead to a
remediation of cooperative practices of local working contexts. The
project therefore therefore reconstructs the emergence and proliferation
of web applications as a software- and data-oriented infrastructural
history of cooperative media. We focus on the mutual production of
cooperative conditions from collective, locally limited as well as
translocally distributed work contexts and the corresponding situated
data practices and arrangements (such as format usage, user
administration, file sharing, collaborative processing of files,
programming, error correction, patenting, standardization, etc.).
We are particularly interested in the interactions between work practices and the specific requirements for cooperation they produce, and in the materializations and affordances of digital micro-practices, through which cooperative conditions are ultimately realized in the form of digitally networked applications. We analyze these dynamics before the background of a longue durée of bureaucratic and administrative processes. These form the underlying socio-technical conditions that determine the materiality of cooperative computing, networking and data processing.
This research project is a part of the Collaborative Research Center „Media of Cooperation“ at Siegen University. Feel free to contact us anytime! Up to date publications can be found at our Media of Cooperation homepage.
Am 29. Oktober 2019 feiert das Arpanet seinen 50. Geburtstag. Mein Geburtstagsständchen zu dieser zweiten Mondlandung des Jahres 1969 ist in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung erschienen (23. Oktober, S. N4).
Alexander McKenzie (Bolt, Beranek and Newman): ARPANET-Topologie im Dezember 1969. Kreise verzeichnen die Interface Message Processors an UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB und der University of Utah. Rechtecke bezeichnen die angeschlossenen Computer XDS Sigma-7, XDS 940, IBM 360/75 und DEC PDP-10. Zeichnung, undatiert.
Die dreckige Wäsche wird immer zum Schluss gewaschen. Yasha Levines furiose Abrechnung mit dem Surveillance Valley setzt auf den letzten Seiten zum Rundumschlag an. Egal ob Edward Snowden, Jacob Applebaum, Roger Dingledine oder die Electronic Frontier Foundation: Für Levine spielen die Aktivisten rund um die Verschlüsselungssoftware Tor allzu naiv das Spiel von Geheimdiensten und Militärs mit, ohne sich kritisch mit der Herkunft ihrer favorisierten Technologien auseinander zu setzen. Levine, Sohn russischer Einwanderer und investigativer Journalist, hält sich hingegen an die Devise follow the money. Er beginnt sein Buch mit der bekannten Geschichte von Sputnik-Schock und Vietnamkrieg, die in den USA der 1960er-Jahre staatliche Forschungsgelder im ungeahnten Umfang mobilisierten. Er widmet sich der Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), die auf dieser Basis als Forschungsagentur des US-Verteidigungsministeriums gegründet wird.
Als Urszene der digitalen Überwachung fungieren in Surveillance Valley die strategischen Aktivitäten der ARPA zur Aufstandsbekämpfung im Project Agile. Sie beruhten auf einer Analyse des Militärgeheimdienstmanns William Godel: Angesichts der militärischen Fehler der französischen Kolonialmacht in Vietnam lautete dessen Schlussfolgerung, dass zukünftige counterinsurgency kleinteiliger, verdeckt, mit mehr High-Tech und psychologischer Kriegsführung operieren müsse. Noch vor Ausbruch des Vietnamkrieges baute die ARPA daher für das Pentagon gezielt Überwachungsstationen in Vietnam auf. Im Rahmen von Operation Igloo White wurden – weitestgehend ohne Erfolg – tausende Sensoren und Mikrofone im Dschungel platziert.
Thursday, 24 January 2019, University of Siegen Herrengarten 3, 57072 Siegen, room AH 217/218
13:15 Opening Remarks: Standards Revisited Sebastian Gießmann (University of Siegen) / Nadine Taha (University of Siegen)
13:30 Anna Echterhölter (University of Vienna) Red and Black Boxes: Standardization as Mesuroclasm in German New Guinea
14:30 Nadine Taha (University of Siegen) George Eastman and the Calendar Reform
16:00 Geoffrey C. Bowker (University of California, Irvine) Standard Time: Computers, Clocks and Turtles – via Zoom Conference
17:00 Lawrence Busch (Michigan State University) Markets and Standards – via Zoom Conference
Friday, 25 January 2019
10:00 JoAnne Yates (MIT, Sloan School of Management) A New Model for Standard Setting: How IETF became the Standards Body for the Internet
11:00 Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee / University of Siegen) The Accidental Standard: How a Box Became an Industry
13:00 Sebastian Gießmann (University of Siegen) Standardizing Digital Payments
14:00 Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam)/ Fernando van der Vlist (University of Amsterdam / University of Siegen) ‘It’s Graphs All the Way Down’
Standards
are not easy to come by. As infrastructural media they coordinate the
social to an ever-growing extent, thus creating conditions of
cooperation. Standards do so not just by their sociotechnical power, but
also by public uptake and controversies that put their accountability
into question. They can also be understood as engineering and
bureaucratic media that form a basis and condition for cooperation.
Historically, practices of
standardization can be traced back to antiquity, especially in the
history of coins, writing, and measurements. But pre-modern standards
were bound to flounder and dissipate. Early modern knowledge cultures –
partly – realized standardization via hand-made scientific instruments
that extended metrological chains. While pre-industrial attempts to
standardize the aggregation of information in administrative forms have
been limited in scale and scope, 19th century industrialization
interconnected with nationalized politics extended the territories of
standardization. Media infrastructures such as the postal service and
telegraphy became transnational through their administration in
international organizations and a legal foundation via international
treaties. Scale and scope of – inherently political and normative –
standards and metrologies were at the same time constitutive for
colonial prospection and rule.
Computing has given rise to its own
regimes and obsessions of non-governmental standardizing. While early
digital computers were unique, the trajectories of standardization were
then tied to governmental contract research, commercialization and its
coordinative and delegative practices. Serial production and the
diffusion of architectural norms became a matter of economic competition
in the era of mainframe computing in organizations. In multiple ways
both the networking of heterogeneous computers and the success of the
IBM-compatible PC did create a pathway to “open standards” that made
computers publicly accessible. In the transpacific and global arena of
hardware and software production, hyper-standardization has been an
issue ever since. This also involves the questions of formats that
mediate bureaucratic processes, textual representation, visual and
auditory perception, and digital audiovisuality. Formats thus have
become standards that mediate digital practices in their own right, just
like network protocols and Internet standards. In many ways, the
ecology of the World Wide Web is an ecology due to its standardizing
bodies, communities of practice, and institutions like the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Our aim is to understand how standards
generalize and universalize media technologies, and to ask: How do
metrology, industrialization, and imperialism/colonialism intersect with
standards? What is the relation between standards, digital media, and
coordination? How to explain the longue durée, ecology, and the enduring
power of standards to configure cooperation? What is the relation
between standards, delegative power, scale, and scope of media?
![Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates the World Wide Web to delegates at the Hypertext 1991 conference in San Antonio, Texas [CERN-IT-9112021-01]](https://netzeundnetzwerke.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/berners_lee_san_antonio_1991_FARBE.png)
