Sebastian Giessmann. The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures since 1832. The MIT Press. 2024
Chapter Reviewed: Chapter 2: Six Strata of Network History: Genealogy of a Cultural Technique
Review by: Catherine A. Evans, Carnegie Mellon University, caevans@andrew.cmu.edu
In the opening to The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832, Sebastian Giessmanndraws attention to the seemingly contradictory roles of “nets.” He writes,“Nets hold, connect, and catch; they also entangle, bind, and ensnare” (7). Across eleven chapters, Giessmann builds, from the history of nets, networking as a form of cultural technique. Lending readings through objects as diverse and ranging as the London Underground’s “Tube map” to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone promotional tours to eighteenth and nineteenth-century microscopy, mathematics, and chemistry, Giessmann’s media history retunes us to the infrastructural, material, and cultural that undergirds our networks. For those of us in American cultural studies, media studies, or literary studies following what folks like Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, and others have articulated as the “infrastructural turn,” Giessman’s newly translated work provides a long overdue study of networks1.
The primary concern for the book, as Giessmann puts it, is to “understand how the status of being a network is achieved,” and as a result, the “methodology follows from the material itself” (2, 3). In Chapter 2, “Six Strata of Network History: Genealogy of a Cultural Technique,” Giessmann puts this methodology into action as he walks readers through the “relatively young phenomenon” of networks and offers a genealogy of sorts (13). The six strata he offers are 1) material understanding; 2) mythological use; 3) a physical-reticular perspective; 4) an infrastructural paradigm; 5) the dimension of social networks; and 6) the recent turn to “network science.” (quotations his own). While I am not going to take the space in this review to walk through each of these strata, you’ll have to read the book for that, I do want to take the space to attend to his application of the strata to network cultures.
Figure 1: Giessmann’s use of André Leroi-Gourhan’s Milieu et techniques (1945), which he uses to demonstrate the wide range of vocabulary for different kinds of nets and their varied uses (15).
According to Giessmann, since the 1960s and the rise of grassroots social movements, the rapid development of the World Wide Web, open software such as Linx, and free crowdsourced information in places such as Wikipedia, all reflect a type of idealism. This idealism, as he sees it, moves countercultures online. The result is an attempt to make networking tools “universally accessible” (29). While this is, indeed, true, it can feel all the more distant to our lived reality in 2025, as the networks that were once promising of social change, as Giessmann notes environmental movements thrived online, are now operationalized through artificial intelligence to accelerate the murder of the planet and of people2. While free, open platforms do still exist, the rapid subscription-based and pay-walled sites are all the more common now. Giessmann offers such critique himself briefly in this chapter, referencing Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in relation to “blackboxing” and “tactical network analysis” for the military and imperial surveillance. I bring the reference to the boom of artificial intelligence and our present moment not to distract from Giessmann’s rich articulation of networks’ history and cultural practices, but to emphasize the point he leaves us with at the end of Chapter 2. As he puts it: “Every network needs a qualitative assessment of its practices of connecting, repairing, disconnecting, and ceasing operation… Agency is too multifarious and intricate for any scheme of one-sided quantification and operationalization to work.” (30). If we take this call seriously, we, as scholars and educators, are left to advocate not just against appropriated uses of cultural studies, media studies, or literary studies in supposed “innovative” digital projects, but to resist quantification, exploitation, and, not to be too dramatic but, death, as Giessman puts it.
See Lisa Park and Nicole Starosielski’s edited collection Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure(2015) and Starosielski’s The Undersea Network(2015), as well as Juan Llamas-Rodriguez’s recent Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground(2023) among many other works emerging in the “infrastructural turn.” ↩︎
There is a lot to be said on this point, but to avoid veering too far from Giessmann, briefly gesturing to the network climate of 2025. See public-facing pieces, including The Uneven Distributions of AI’s Environmental Impacts, OpenAI entering business with Anduril’s drone defense systems, and AI is Sending People to Jail – and Getting it Wrong and folks’ work in Critical AI Studies. ↩︎