The Connectivity of Things
Subtitle: Network Cultures since 1832
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2024
Language: eng
Translated from: ger
Translation of: Die Verbundenheit der Dinge
Format: eBook
Number of pages: 444
ISBN-13: 9780262381093
Copyright date: 2024
Other titles: Die Verbundenheit der Dinge
Description: **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.