Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review)
Priscilla Wald · Perspectives in biology and medicine · 2003
"In the first days of the third millennium, we live as ganglia in a network of organic and technological communications devices." With that observation, Laura Otis concludes Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, her historical study of the concept of the network or web and its particular evolution in relation to ideas about communication in the 19th century.The breadth ofOtis's research and expertise makes her claims persuasive, and her facility as a storyteller makes it a compelling read. But Networking does its most significant work in its historical exploration of human interactions with machines. It is at once an important reminder that, however innovative the technology, computers do not represent a radical conceptual shift in those interactions, and that the concept of "human being" is intrinsically unstable and characteristically undergoes revision in relation to social, scientific, and technological developments.