Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The use of cybernetic metaphors drawn from communications networks may seem to be a recent phenomenon, growing out of the increasing importance of computers in contemporary life. But Laura Otis demonstrates that such metaphors have had a long and powerful influence ever since telegraph networks first separated communication from transportation. Networking is a sophisticated but jargon-free analysis of the ways in which scientific and technological ideas created novel explanatory metaphors that also became powerful tools for understanding social and natural systems. Otis is most explicit about this in the conclusion to her first chapter, which explores the connections between electricity and the electric telegraph and scientific concepts of the nervous system: "metaphors do not 'express' scientists' ideas; they are the ideas. Metaphors suggest new visions, images, and models; they inspire scientists to approach problems in new ways" (p. 48).

One of the more interesting aspects of Otis's study concerns the attention paid by scientists to the metaphorical nature of knowledge, including its unstable relationship to physical reality. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz drew upon electrical science and telegraph technology to design instruments to measure the velocity of nerve impulses. But he also recognized that nerve impulses, like telegraph signals, had to be interpreted once they were received. Turning from early researches on the functions of nerves to later research on their structure, Otis notes that scientists using similar techniques arrived at very different conclusions depending on how receptive they were to the use of network or web metaphors. Indeed, she argues that as telegraph networks matured they may no longer have provided an apt metaphor for a dynamic, growing system.

Organic webs and technological networks provided competing but not exclusive visions of social and natural systems. British physiologist George Henry Lewes objected to the telegraph as a metaphor for the nervous system, preferring to see it instead as an organic web for the circulation of information. His partner George Eliot likewise used the organic-web metaphor but recognized that telegraph and railway networks were essential parts of the web of communication that maintained the social connections she described in her novels such as Middlemarch, the subject of Otis's third chapter. Otis argues that for both Lewes and Eliot communication systems fostered sympathy and moral growth whether connecting regions of the body or communities.

In the next two chapters Otis examines the meaning of the telegraph system for telegraphers. Her focus here on a few texts seems much less successful for drawing out metaphoric meanings, though these do provide a way for her to meditate on her subtitle, "communicating with bodies and machines." Otis addresses fictional accounts that appeared in American telegraph journals, in the novel Wired Love by the American writer Ella Cheever Thayer, and in the Henry James novella In the Cage, which is about British telegraphers. Although a growing number of women telegraphers influenced the romantic character of this fiction and Otis does develop a gendered analysis, it seems incomplete. After all, women remained a minority of the workforce in the United States if not in Britain.

Otis's readings of these works also largely ignore the changing experience of male operators. Here the analysis would have benefited from some attention to the social history of telegraphers, notably the work of Edwin Gabler and Thomas Jepsen. In addition, if Otis had paid more attention to the actual work of operators she could have made even more concrete the connection between telegraphy and nerves by discussing the common nervous affliction known as telegrapher's palsy. Nonetheless, these chapters provide important insights regarding the promise and perils of an instantaneous communication system in which the mediation by technology and human operators seemed to produce both intimacy and alienation.

By the end of the nineteenth century a growing interest in the possibility of wireless communication had emerged in combination with...