Schlagwort: Telephone Switching

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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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La science et la vie

There’s much to be said about this title page of the French journal La science et la vie. It comes with all the ambivalent connotations of gender, telephony, labor and automation history. We can still see a shadow of „la demoiselle du téléphone“ in the center of the image. Yet, the telephone girl or „Fräulein vom Amt“ has become a non-human switching machine in 1927. Experts of telephone infrastructure are going to notice the rotary selector and a stepping switch at the bottom of the image. Plus, the switching network in the center shows a line of alphabetic letters.

This circuit with letters points to an unusual feature of Paris telephone switchboards of the time. The first three letters of a telephone code indicated the telephone exchange. They were followed by four digits representing the person being called, which correspond here to the four dials of the “brain.” The seven-digit number could be entered using dials on which the twenty-five letters were printed.

Besides this technical dimension of social addressing, this title page also invokes older, reticular representations of networks. Blue and red lines remind us of the color conventions in anatomy and blood circulation, and thus provide a rather corporeal link for the telephone call of a man and a woman. More on telephone networking can be found in chapter 5 of „The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832.“

Title page of the journal La science et la vie. Color lithograph, May 1927.
Title page of the journal La science et la vie. Color lithograph, May 1927.
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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

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