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Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 18 February 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14762.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262382748
An in-depth investigation of the Twitch streamers who make up the largest population on the platform: those streaming to small audiences or even no one. The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us , Mia Consalvo, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals. For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 18 February 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15581.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381529
A prominent anthropologist in conversation with one of America's most influential psychologists and educators. In 1997, anthropologist Bradd Shore set out to interview the distinguished psychologist Jerome Bruner; his theme: psychology and anthropology—what links and separates the disciplines. What emerged over the course of four days was something far broader and more interesting: a wide-ranging conversation that explored the study of human behavior and meaning while capturing the unique energy, complexity, and charm of Bruner's manner of thinking through dialogue. This conversation appears for the first time in At the Crossroads of Psychology and Anthropology , offering readers unprecedented insight into Bruner's thought and influences—and a unique chance to share the pleasure of his company. Edited into chapters with brief introductions, the book begins with the influences shaping Bruner's career, his role in the founding of cognitive psychology, his debates with fellow psychologists, his collaborations with his notable students, and his emerging interest in cultural psychology. The talk touches on contrasting methodologies, approaches to language, sense perception, violence, law, the role of categories in thinking, cultural relativism, the search for universals, and the complex interactions of culture and mind. In addition to portraying two approaches to the human sciences, At the Crossroads of Psychology and Anthropology is an intimate portrait of Bruner, a major shaper of modern psychology—and a demonstration of the dialectical and dialogical nature of his thought in all its fluidity and depth. Jerome Bruner (1915-2016) taught at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. He was the author of Acts of Meaning , The Culture of Education , Actual Minds , Possible Worlds and other seminal books on psychology and education.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 04 February 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15519.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381673
How the purposive behavior of living systems outstrips the constraints of the free energy principle. Since 2005, Karl Friston's proposal that the principle of free energy minimization underpins the purposive behavior of living agents has evolved through thousands of publications. This principle's central move is to formalize the drive for self-preservation in terms of a single probabilistic imperative: to survive, a living system must consistently exhibit the same “most likely” pattern of activity over time. Despite the simplicity of this central claim, the free energy principle's complexity and rate of development have previously made it difficult to identify and evaluate. In A Drive to Survive , Kathryn Nave offers an extended critical analysis of the strengths and limitations of Friston's proposal. Nave shows that the free energy principle's capacity to account for the biological origins of purposiveness is undermined by its applicability to any stable inanimate system. As this triviality has become apparent, so advocates have begun to reframe the free energy principle as a means to eliminate, rather than explain, the notion of distinctively biological purposiveness. This, Nave proposes, gets things the wrong way around. The triviality of free energy minimization does not prove that there is no difference in kind between living agents and ordinary machines, but rather it reflects that the framework cannot capture the intrinsic instability and unpredictability that distinguish the former.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 21 January 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14588.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381352
How digital social reading apps are powerfully changing—and nurturing—the way we read. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that digital technology is a threat to reading, but in Digital Social Reading , Federico Pianzola argues that reading socially through digital media can help people grow a passion for reading and, in some cases, even enhance text comprehension. Digital social reading (DSR) is a term that encompasses a wide variety of practices related to the activity of reading and using digital technologies and platforms (websites, social media, mobile apps) to share thoughts and impressions about books with others. This book is the first systematization of DSR practices, drawing on case studies from Wattpad, AO3, and Goodreads on a worldwide scale. Using a combination of qualitative and computational methods, Pianzola offers fresh insight into the reading experience on the scale of big data. He discusses the impact of digital technology on reading skills and shows that a change of methodological perspective is necessary to understand the positive potential of DSR for promoting reading more broadly. He argues that it is not just the medium that changes but also the context and the attitudes of readers. He also asserts that grassroots media and open, bottom-up communities are crucial to the success of many reading practices today, especially with young audiences.
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Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 21 January 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15298.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381215
A new paradigm of research, policy, and practice that acknowledges the multiple scales at which we live every day. The Pointillistic City explores the multilayer geography of our daily lives—specifically, how we simultaneously live at the scales of addresses, streets, and neighborhoods and how each can be relevant for our well-being. Not unlike the way in which we look at a pointillistic painting, which depicts a full scene through the detailed organization of multiple objects, Daniel T. O'Brien considers the three scales together and the comprehensive understanding of the city they offer. The pointillistic approach to the city contrasts with decades of focus on neighborhoods. As such, it surfaces microspatial inequities , or disparities in experiences between people living in the same neighborhood, even right around the corner from each other. Microspatial inequities have gone largely unnoticed to date, and their recognition offers a new approach to understanding and supporting the diverse population of the city. This book illustrates the pointillistic perspective on cities with two in-depth case studies—one on crime, the other on environmental justice—in Boston. These studies highlight microspatial inequities and their interplay with broader neighborhood conditions, and they go even further by demonstrating how these insights can be incorporated into a new generation of policies and practices that are science driven and community led, truly addressing disparities both between and within our communities.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 21 January 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15639.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380904
An empirical approach to constructing macroeconomic models. Macroeconomic Modeling presents an empirically based approach to the construction of macroeconomic models—the Cowles Commission approach—as a response to the backlash that has taken place since the late 1970s to this methodology. The emphasis in the literature has been on tightly specified theoretical models, which lack realism. In this book, Ray C. Fair develops models to analyze a variety of issues and events in macroeconomics and the US economy, and he explains the econometric techniques needed to estimate those models. Many of the results are either contrary to results from the theoretical models or cannot be examined by the theoretical models because they omit many important features of the economy. Fair covers a broad range of topics, including inflation and unemployment, the size of wealth effects, the behavior of the Federal Reserve and its effects on the economy, the effects of fiscal policy, Okun's law, and contractions and expansions. Macroeconomic Modeling will appeal equally to graduate students and researchers as well as macroeconomic policy makers.
Series: Strüngmann Forum Reports
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 21 January 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15533.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262378871
A multidisciplinary examination of the phenomenon of collaboration to expand knowledge and inform future activities. Human existence depends critically on how well diverse social, cultural and political groups can collaborate. Yet the phenomenon of collaboration itself is ill-defined and badly understood, and there is no straightforward formula for its successful realization. In The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration , edited by Paul F. M. J. Verschure, experts from wide-ranging disciplines examine how human collaboration arises, breaks down, and potentially recovers. They explore the different contexts, boundary conditions, and drivers of collaboration to expand understanding of the underlying dynamic, multiscale processes in an effort to increase chances for ethical, sustainable, and productive collaboration in the future. This volume is accompanied by twenty-four podcasts, which provide insights from real-world examples. Contributors Asaf Bachrach, Kevin Bauer, Jenna Bednar, Eric D. Beinhocker, Johan Bollen, Federica Carugati, Esther Chevrot-Bianco, A. C. C. Coolen, Tamas David-Barrett, Simon DeDeo, Dana Dolghin, L. Zachary DuBois, Ismael T. Freire, Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, Rebecca D. Hardin, Sebastian Kahl, Heidi Keller, Mette Løvschal, Julia R. Lupp, Jônatas Manzolli, George E. Marcus, Marcia L. McLain, Stephanie Musgrave, Melody N. Ndzenyuiy, J. Chris Nierstrasz, Raul Pacheco-Vega, Scott E. Page, Bhavani R. Rao, Andreas Roepstorff, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Dennis J. Snower, Sidney Strauss, Justin Sulik, Veena Suresh, Kristian Tylén, Sander E. van der Leeuw, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Alicia von Schenk, Ferdinand von Siemens
Series: History of Computing
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 07 January 2025
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/10546.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380270
How Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing, from computer maker to the world's leading chip manufacturer. How did Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and the last fortress of the defeated Chinese Nationalists, ascend to such heights in high-tech manufacturing? In Island Tinkerers , Honghong Tinn tells the critical history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, including engineers, technologists, technocrats, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country with their hands-on engagement with computers. Rather than engaging in wholesale imitation of US sources, she explains, these technologists tinkered with imported computing technology and experimented with manufacturing their own versions, resulting in their own brand of successful innovation. Defying the stereotype of “the West innovates, and the East imitates,” Tinn tells the story of Taiwanese technologists' efforts over the past six decades. Beginning in the 1960s, they grappled with the “black-boxed” computers that were newly available through international technical-aid programs. Shortly after, multinational corporations that outsourced transistor and integrated circuit assembly overseas began employing Taiwanese engineers and factory workers. Island tinkerers developed strategies to adapt, modify, assemble, and work with computers in an inventive manner. It was through this creative and ingenious tinkering with computers that they were able to gain a better understanding of the technology, opening the door to future manufacturing endeavors that now include Acer, Foxconn, Asus, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 24 December 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/7374.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380232
How the innate physical properties of different technologies influence the strategy and structure of the organizations implementing the technologies, the sequel to Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. In Design Rules , volume 2, Carliss Baldwin offers a comprehensive view of the digital economy by putting forth an original theory that explains how technology shapes organizations in a market economy. The theory claims that complementarities arising from the physical nature of technologies can be arrayed on a spectrum ranging from strong to very weak. Two basic types of technologies in turn exhibit different degrees of complementarity between their internal components. Flow production technologies, which are found in steel mills and auto factories, specify a series of steps, each of which is essential to the final product. In contrast, platform technologies, which are characteristic of computer hardware, software, and networks, are modular systems designed to provide options. Baldwin then investigates the dynamics of strategy for firms in platform ecosystems. Such firms create value by solving technical bottlenecks—technical barriers to performance that arise in different parts of the system as it evolves. They capture value by controlling and defending strategic bottlenecks—components that are (1) essential to the functioning of some part of the system; (2) unique; and (3) controlled by a profit-seeking enterprise. Strategic bottlenecks can be acquired by solving technical bottlenecks. They can be destroyed via tactics such as substitution, reverse engineering, bypassing the bottleneck, and enveloping a smaller bottleneck within a larger one. Strategy in platform ecosystems can thus be viewed as the effective management of technical and strategic bottlenecks within a modular technical system.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 17 December 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15344.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381239
An exploration of how we know we're playing and what happens when we don't. Playframes builds on the work of Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman to take a deep dive into Bateson's primary question: How do we know we're playing? In this book, Celia Pearce addresses this question by building a comprehensive theory of the specific mechanisms that metacommunicate the message “this is play.” This “big tent” approach covers a broad swath of playframes, ranging from theme parks to cosplay, board and video games, and sports, and describes how spatial and temporal frames, as well as artifacts such as costumes and uniforms, toys, and sports equipment, let us know when a play activity is underway. Pearce teases out distinctions between ritual and play activities, including social practices in which they merge or are indistinguishable, as well as incidents of frame breach or misalignment, where participants' perception of “what is going on” diverges. These principles are illustrated with a series of four topical studies that explore various scenarios in which play and non-play contexts are juxtaposed or blurred. These span from delightful (fan convention cosplay and simulated and virtual weddings) to confusing (virtual currency and bitcoin) to dangerous. Building on recent research, the book culminates with an in-depth analysis of the gaming roots of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and argues that playframe breach and deliberate misalignment were the major contributing factors.
Series: Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 03 December 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14860.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380638
A reinterpretation of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis through the lens of Darwinian natural selection and multispecies community evolution. First conceived in the 1970s, James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis proposed that living organisms developed in tandem with their inorganic surroundings, forming a complex, self-regulating system. Today, most evolutionary biologists consider the theory problematic. In Darwinizing Gaia , W. Ford Doolittle, one of evolutionary and molecular biology's most prestigious thinkers, reformulates what evolution by natural selection is while legitimizing the controversial Gaia Hypothesis. As the first book attempting to reconcile Gaia with Darwinian thinking, and the first on persistence-based evolution, Doolittle's clear, innovative position broadens evolutionary theory by offering potential remedies for Gaia's theoretical challenges. Unquestionably, the current “polycrisis” is the most complex that Homo sapiens has ever faced, and this book can help overcome the widespread belief that evolutionary biologists don't believe Lovelock. Written in the tradition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene , Darwinizing Gaia will appeal to students, evolutionary scientists, philosophers, and microbiologists, as well as environmentalists seeking to understand the Earth as a system, at a time when climate change has drawn our planet's structure and function into sharp relief.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 03 December 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15425.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380898
A media history of simulation that contextualizes our digital heritage and the history of computing. In Computing Legacies , Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy. Secondly, he positions simulation as crucial for the preservation of cultural memory, where modeling, emulation, and serious play are constitutive in how we relate to our mediated history. And lastly, despite suggestions that we may already live in a simulation, he interrogates how simulation can serve as critique of the computer age. In tracing our digital heritage, Computing Legacies elucidates inflection points where quantitative data becomes tractable for qualitative evaluations: modeling epidemics for scientific study or entertainment, emulating older devices, turning numerical calculations into music, conducting espionage in virtual worlds, and gamifying higher education. Simulation, this book demonstrates, is pivotal not only to high-tech research and to archives, museums, and the preservation of digital culture but also to our understanding of what it is to live and work under the technical conditions of computing.
Series: Urban and Industrial Environments
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 03 December 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15174.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381185
Why the energy transition must be more than a fuel source replacement, and how we can seize the opportunity of the transition to build a more just future for all. To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, not least regarding the social impact. In A Just Transition for All, J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy researcher who also works with advocacy organizations and unions—offers a comprehensive analysis of how we can enact transformational changes that meaningfully improve people's lives. Cha provides a novel governance framework called the Four+ Pillars , formulated from original research to provide a way to move from theory to practice. The Pillars framework includes a novel analysis that guides readers in understanding how to formulate effective just transition policies, what makes them just or unjust, and, similarly, what makes transition just and unjust. The framework also combines theoretical discussions with original empirical research and provides insights into perceptions of just transition. Grounded in real-world perspectives that make the case for policies that advance the interests of all, not just of fossil fuel workers, Cha charts the path forward to an equitable and sustainable future that no longer depends on fossil fuels.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 12 November 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14061.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262375405
An exploration of the emerging quantum technological paradigm and its effects on human consciousness and cultures. In Quantum Ecology , Stefano Calzati and Derrick de Kerckhove identify three technological ecologies—linguistic, digital, and quantum—to better understand today's shattered globalized contemporaneity and navigate the impact of soon-to-come quantum information technologies. Today's societies, based as they are on language and writing, face disruption brought on by digital transformation, which is not predicated on sharing meaning but on sheer computability. This produces what the authors call an “epistemological crisis.” From here, the book explores how emerging quantum computers and communication will trigger an even deeper existential shift based on quantum physics' principles of discreteness, uncertainty, and entanglement. Enriched with evidence from biology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, and information and cognitive sciences, the authors draw upon diverse case studies to sustain a convincing philosophical and political argument. The book's chapters move from a discussion about the coevolution of humans and language to the codependence of writing, thinking, and innovation, then proceed to investigate “datacracy,” the power of algorithms. Finally, the authors outline the looming psychocultural effects and geopolitical challenges of the nascent quantum technological paradigm.
Series: Platform Studies
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 05 November 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14266.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380553
The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash , Snafu , Star Strike , Utopia —do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari's main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision , Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision's chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983. While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 05 November 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14221.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262379014
A novel interpretation of the history and theory of technology from the perspective of toys, play, and play objects. Toy Theory addresses the relationships between toys and technology in two distinct but overlapping ways: first, as underexamined cultural artifacts and behaviors with significant technical attributes and, second, as playful and toylike dimensions of technology at large. Seth Giddings sets out a “toy theory” of technology that emphasizes the speculative, experimental, and noninstrumental in technological paradigms and argues that children's playthings, rather than being the most ephemeral and inconsequential of technical devices, instead offer analytical and anthropological resources for understanding the materiality and imaginaries of technology over time. After defining toy theory in general and conceptual terms, Giddings examines different types of toys to explore shifting relationships between the microcosmic symbolic or mimetic content, material and technical constitution, and modes of play of toys and toy-related artifacts, on the one hand, and prevailing, macrocosmic, technological paradigms and imaginaries, on the other. Taking a broad historical and genealogical view, Giddings traces contemporary postdigital toy and play culture to precedents from the neolithic through to the Enlightenment to consumer culture from the early nineteenth century to the present day.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 29 October 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15450.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262380393
An expert exploration of the foundations of America's science and technology policies, and the dynamics of its innovation system. Why study science and technology policy? What role does innovation play, and how do we foster it? Economics tells us technological innovation drives economic growth and societal well-being, but technology is always a double-edged sword—great technological advances offer both opportunities and threats. In Pioneering Progress , William Bonvillian explains the complex science and technology innovation system and discusses the challenges of emerging industrial policies. Drawing on in-depth case studies on critical areas such as energy, computing, advanced manufacturing, and health, with an emphasis on the needed public policy and the federal government R&D role in those systems, Bonvillian reviews the foundations of economic growth theory, innovation systems theory, and innovation organization theory. Bonvillian, a highly respected expert who has worked as a deputy assistant secretary of transportation in the federal government and a senior advisor in Congress, reviews a new theory of direct and indirect economic factors in the innovation system. He describes the innovation-based competitive and advanced manufacturing challenges now facing the US economy, reviews comparative efforts in other nations, studies the varied models for how federal science and technology mission agencies are organized, and explores the growth of public-private partnership and industrial policy models as a way for science mission agencies to pursue mission agendas. Pioneering Progress places particular emphasis on the organization and role of medical science and energy innovation agencies and how we can address the gaps in the health, energy, and advanced production innovation economic models.
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 22 October 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15408.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262379670
How AI will challenge our ideas about personhood. Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line , James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to “the line” we believe separates our species from the rest of the world but that also separates “persons” with legal rights from objects. The personhood wars—over the rights of corporations and animals, over the question of when life begins and ends—have always been contentious. We've even denied the personhood of members of our own species. How will those old fights affect the new ones, and vice versa? Boyle pursues these questions across a dizzying array of fields. He discusses moral philosophy and science fiction, transgenic species, nonhuman animals, the surprising history of corporate personality, and AI itself. Engaging with empathy and anthropomorphism, courtroom battles on behalf of chimps, and doom-laden projections about the threat of AI, The Line offers fascinating and thoughtful answers to questions about our future that will arrive sooner than we think.
Series: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 15 October 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/15453.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262379960
A novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families. Merge is the structure-building operation in Chomsky's Minimalist Program. In When Arguments Merge , Elise Newman develops a new Merge-based theory of the syntax of argument structure, taking inspiration from wh- questions. She uncovers new connections between disparate empirical phenomena and provides a unified analysis of patterns across many languages and language families, from Mayan to Bantu to Indo-European languages (among others). The result is a syntactic theory with a small inventory of features and categories that can combine in a limited number of ways, capturing the range of argument configurations that we find cross-linguistically in both declarative and interrogative contexts. Newman's novel approach to argument structure is based on the time at which different kinds of arguments merge and move in the verbal domain. Assuming that all kinds of Merge are driven by features, she proposes that subset relationships between elements bearing different sets of features can constrain the distribution of arguments in unexpected ways and that different feature bundles can predict unusual interactions between arguments in many contexts. The positions of arguments in different contexts have consequences for agreement alignment and case assignment, which are reflected in the Voice of the clause. Examining the order in which verbs and their arguments are combined, she explores the consequences of different orders of combination for the kinds of utterances observed across languages.
Series: Infrastructures
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 15 October 2024
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/12547.001.0001
EISBN: 9780262381093
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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