Networking: communicating with bodies and machines in the by Laura Christine Otis PDF

By Laura Christine Otis

ISBN-10: 0472112139

ISBN-13: 9780472112135

This compelling interdisciplinary learn investigates the clinical and cultural roots of up to date conceptions of the community, together with computing device details platforms, the human frightened approach, and communications expertise, demonstrating that similar to the community is basically centuries outdated. Networking areas present comparisons of nerve and computing device networks in standpoint, exploring early analogies linking nerves and telegraphs and demonstrating how 19th-century neurobiologists, engineers, and fiction writers prompted each one other’s rules approximately communication.The interdisciplinary sweep of neuroscientist and literary pupil Laura Otis’s publication is amazing, focusing at the same time on literary works through such authors as George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and Mark Twain and at the medical and technological achievements of such pioneers as Luigi Galvani, Hermann von Helmholtz, Charles Babbage, Samuel Morse, and Werner von Siemens. Networking will entice common readers in addition to to students within the fields of interdisciplinary experiences, 19th-century literature, and the heritage of technology and know-how. The paperback variation of the publication has been up to date with a preface via the author.“A refined yet jargon-free research of the ways that medical and technological rules created novel explanatory metaphors that still turned robust instruments for realizing social and normal systems.”—Technology and tradition

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By the 1820s, such tables were invaluable not just to astronomers but to the nautical and insurance industries, although unfortunately, as Babbage revealed in one study, "the quantity of errors from carelessness ... will scarcely be believed" (2: 8). Between 1820 and 1832, as he painstakingly designed his calculating engine, he learned about manufacturing, toolmaking, and mechanical drawing, his original, creative mind allowing him to ffiake lasting contributions to each field. fields. As early as 1820, he had seen that mental labor, like physical, could be effectively divided.

The inability of nerves to resume activity when spliced, however, indicated a key difference between organic and technological communications systems. These systems were analogous, but not identical. Later in the same lecture, DuBois-Reymond stated that the nervous principle "must necessar- The Language of the Nerves • 25 ily be something material, [but] not ... the electricity such as it moves along a telegraph-wire" (99). He continued m refer to the telegraph as the most useful analog for the nervous system, however, because it so clearly indicated differences as well as similarities.

Technology suggested how the mind and body solved problems, and organic systems suggested ways to build better machines. Even as Babbage and sympathetic mathematicians indicated the key differences between minds and machines, they revealed a great deal about their underlying similarities. Waxing enthusiastic, Buxton forgets himself for a moment in declaring, "the mar-Velous pulp and fiber of a brain had been substituted by brass and iron,'[Babbage] had taught wheel work to think, or at least to do the office of thought" (48-49, original emphasis).

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Networking: communicating with bodies and machines in the nineteenth century by Laura Christine Otis


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