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

The theme of this book is the ways in which ideas of networking have permeated various aspects of Western culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Laura Otis maintains that the network or web has become a dominant metaphor that has structured scientific and technological thinking, as well as influencing the ways in which issues of individuality and communication have been explored in a wider culture. The network has also become central to understandings of economic and other social relations.

Thanks to early nineteenth-century developments in neurophysiology, the web came to be seen as nature's mechanism for transmitting information through the body. This notion in turn inspired and informed efforts to construct artificial communication networks: the body provided a model for technological innovation. The flow has not, however, been all in one direction: technological systems have long served as a resource for understanding organic structure and function. In the nineteenth century, it became commonplace to compare the nervous system to a telegraph network; by the twentieth century, cybernetic analogies had come to the fore. Economic and social mechanisms of circulation and transfer also became implicated in this process of cross-fertilization.

Much of the book is therefore a fascinating account of these complex interrelations. For instance, Emil DuBois Reymond, the eminent electrophysiologist, was wont to compare nerves to telegraph wires. He also held that Germany's communication system was superior to that of France because it was more natural and organic in its design. Charles Babbage was convinced that brains, factories, and calculating machines all operated on analogous principles. Otis charts the way in which the distinction between the biological and the technological has become increasingly problematic in the modern era. Indeed, she cites instances where the boundary between human and machine seemed to dissolve.

When it comes to saying just what one is to make of these links between different discourses, Otis is, however, somewhat elusive. At one place she writes of a "feedback loop between science and culture" (p. 5); this seems at odds with the view expressed elsewhere in the book of a common culture of which scientific discourse is one component. In another passage she asserts that "[George] Eliot, like the neuroscientists of the 1870s, saw webs in their tissues not because the scientists influenced her but because they all internalized the humming, ever-expanding communications networks that they saw functioning around them" (p. 82); this would seem to ascribe a causal priority to the material products of networking that belies the central contention of the book.

There is an abrupt shift of register midway through the book as Otis provides readings of a number of fictional texts. Some of these, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula and Eliot's Middlemarch, are well known. Others, including a collection of short stories written by telegraphers that appeared in 1877, will be new to most readers. These works have in common a shared interest in the impact of new technologies on human relations. This combination of themes familiar to historians of science and technology with literary criticism is stimulating—but a closer integration of the two aspects of the book would have been welcome.