Sebastian Giessmann <https://netzeundnetzwerke.de/> informs that his book 'Open access: The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832 <https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5866/The-Connectivity-of-ThingsNetwork-Cultures-since>', is now available from MIT Press as a free open access download. The blurb hails this as a German classic, only now translated 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. * Get it at https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5866/The-Connectivity-of-ThingsNet... If you should desire a printed hard copy use https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/763375/the-connectivity-of-things-b... US residents can try a 20% off discount code READMIT20 -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +12185659365 -------------------------------------- -