World Projects: Global Information before World War I (Volume 45) (Electronic Mediations) - Softcover

Krajewski, Markus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816683514 ISBN 13: 9780816683512

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2015

Synopsis

Markus Krajewski is emerging as a leading scholar in the field of media archaeology, which seeks to trace cultural history through the media networks that enable and structure it. In World Projects he opens a new portal into the history of globalization by examining several large-scale projects that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, shared a grand yet unachievable goal: bringing order to the world.

Drawing from a broad array of archival materials, Krajewski reveals how expanding commercial relations, growing international scientific agreements, and an imperial monopolization of the political realm spawned ambitious global projects. World Projects contends that the late nineteenth-century networks of cables, routes, and shipping lines—of junctions, crossovers, and transfers—merged into a “multimedia system” that was a prerequisite for conceiving a world project. As examples, he presents the work of three big-thinking “plansmiths,” each of whose work mediates between two discursive fields: the chemist and natural philosopher Wilhelm Ostwald, who spent years promoting a “world auxiliary language” and a world currency; the self-taught “engineer” and self-anointed authority on science and technology Franz Maria Feldhaus, who labored to produce an all-encompassing “world history of technology”; and Walther Rathenau, who put economics to the service of politics and quickly transformed the German economy.

With a keen eye for the outlandish as well as the outsized, Krajewski shows how media, technological structures, and naked human ambition paved the way for global-scale ventures that together created the first “world wide web.”

About this title

About the Author:

Markus Krajewski is professor of media history and theory at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548 –1929.

Charles Marcrum II is a translator of nonfiction and literary works. He earned an AM degree in Germanic languages and literatures from Harvard University.

Review:

"This is a fascinating—and very entertaining—study. It weaves a tapestry of early technological globalization made up of projects, pipe dreams, and propaganda. There is on the part of the author a noticeable affection for these world infatuations, but there is also the necessary amount of gentle mockery when they become too unworldly."—Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, University of British Columbia    

"World Projects carves out a much needed space for human involvement in networked systems and, by doing so, comments on our own struggles for agency within our highly “globalized” networks today."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Always informative and has true worth for researchers and media archeologists."—Neural

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0816683514
• ISBN 13: 9780816683512
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328