Schlagwort: Networking

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On The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832

What is the truth about the network? And what might it tell us in our current situation? After five years of translation and fine-grained updating, Sebastian Giessmann’s seminal book on The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832 finally came out in October 2024 with MIT Press. The full text is available in open access.

While the translated book’s historical narrative is deeply rooted in developments of 19th and 20th century infrastructural history, it is also a key work of German media theory. There’s much to discuss here for historians of technology, be it the notion of “cultural techniques,” the seemingly Western grounding of network practice and thought, and the in/visible work of networking in material cultures itself.

Connectivity is a book full of in-depth case studies that deserve a closer look, be it the relation between networks and colonial power in the case of French Saint-Simonianism, be it the early history of the telephone network, visual histories of network diagrams, the mobilities of the London Tube Map, Western and Eastern styles of logistics, and the unlikely inception of the ARPANET. It might be said that networks are a core cultural technique to allow for the migration of people, signs, and objects, which includes their disconnection. Connectivity of Things finally gives us a history that actor-network theory never dared to write itself.

We invite everyone at SHOT in Luxembourg to join the discussion, both in person and per hybrid participation. Our author-meets-critics session will combine key critical questions towards the book, and shall provide insights into the intricacies of such an (un-)timely and complex translation endeavor.

On The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832
Author-meets-critics: Sebastian Giessmann (Siegen), Monika Dommann (Zurich), Cyrus Mody (Maastricht), Elizabeth Petrick (Rice), and Thomas Haigh (Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Society for History of Technology Annual Meeting 2025
„Technologies of Migration – Migrating Technologies“
Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Friday, October 10
12:55 PM – 2:10 PM

Kenneth Gordon McLaren and Eric Leonard Buesnel, Sketch and final drawing of a project network for the market launch of a product. Drawing, 1968–1969.
Kenneth Gordon McLaren and Eric Leonard Buesnel, Sketch and final drawing of a project network for the market launch of a product. Drawing, 1968–1969.
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The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832

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.

The MIT Press, Infrastructures Series
October 15, 2024
444 pp., 6 x 9 in, 82 b&w illus.
Open Access version: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12547.001.0001

„The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832“ weiterlesen

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When ANT met Cultural Techniques: Re-engaging with Network Cultures

Logo Making and Doing Transformations Amsterdam 2024

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?

This is part of a panel at this year’s EASST-4S Conference:
What Is The Past And Future Of Actor-network Theory?
Traditional Open Panel P146
Amsterdam: Making and Doing Transformations
Friday 19 July, 14:00-15:30, 16:00-17:30

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.

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Your Computer Is on Fire

 

„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“ .