Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection Grant Bollmer

Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection

Grant Bollmer

Hardback | 304 pp | August 2016 | ISBN: 9781501316159

Social media's connectivity is often thought to be a manifestation of
human nature buried until now, revealed only through the diverse
technologies of the participatory internet. Rather than embrace this
view, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection
argues that the human nature revealed by social media imagines network
technology and data as models for behavior online. Covering a wide range
of historical and interdisciplinary subjects, Grant Bollmer examines the
emergence of "the network" as a model for relation in the 1700s and
1800s and follows it through marginal, often forgotten articulations of
technology, biology, economics, and the social. From this history,
Bollmer examines contemporary controversies surrounding social media,
extending out to the influence of network models on issues of critical
theory, politics, popular science, and neoliberalism. By moving through
the past and present of network media, Inhuman Networks demonstrates how
contemporary network culture unintentionally repeats debates over the
limits of Western modernity to provide an idealized future where "the
human" is interchangeable with abstract, flowing data connected through
well-managed, distributed networks.

"Part an archaeology of connectivity, part critical analysis of
contemporary culture, Inhuman Networks offers an inspiring take for
media studies. Grant Bollmer's rich, multi-layered book shows that
social media does not just mediate but performs a subtle yet effective
moral code: the networks prescribe senses of the self, community, value
and direction. The so-called human exists only if it routes." -  Jussi
Parikka, Winchester School of Art, UK author of Digital Contagions
(2007) and Insect Media (2010)

"Bollmer's Inhuman Networks represents the best of the cultural studies
tradition of taking the object seriously, learning everything one can
about it, putting it into historical and cultural contexts, and then
rigorously critiquing it. Combining media archaeology and genealogy,
Bollmer crafts critiques of the admonition to connect or be considered
inhuman. However, he also challenges misguided calls for total refusal
of connection, instead insisting we humans re-engage with practices of
collectivity and commonality." -  Robert W. Gehl, Associate Professor of
Communication, University of Utah, USA, and author of Reverse
Engineering Social Media

"Bollmer's Inhuman Networks issues a bold and welcome critique of social
media's culture of connectivity. This accessible, provocative analysis
of the "network" concept is shaped by network theorists predating the
network society: anatomists deciphering the flow of bodily fluids,
railroad conglomerates arguing about rail gauge, defenders of branch
banking, and conspiracy theorists. Bollmer deftly shows how the
conjunction of these early modern discourses of the network combine with
contemporary digital technologies to forge "nodal citizenship," a
reduction of the human to an information node in a broader technological
network. A must-read for anyone interested in communication, media
studies, cultural theory, and political economy." -  Damien Smith
Pfister, Department of Communication, University of Maryland, USA and
author of Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics

"Inhuman Networks masterfully exposes the stunted understandings and
logical fallacies undergirding widespread economic and cultural
assertions that unless we are connected through social media we are less
than human. Bollmer convincingly argues that enlightenment
understandings of "human nature" are being supplanted by neoliberal and
normative narratives of networked communications as the way to finally
achieve full humanity. Yet this is a disempowered form of "humanity"
constituted through capital and data alone and ultimately less important
than the inhuman(e) routers through which individuals "connect" in
empowered and irrelevant ways." -  Ken Hillis, Professor of Media and
Technology Studies University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill USA

"As social media becomes more pervasive in many people's lives globally,
the complex entanglement of the human and inhuman across practices,
cultures, flows and networks are yet to being fully understood. Grant
Bollmer's Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of
Connection offers a thorough and thought-provoking discussion of how we
might re-imagine social media beyond a human-centric model bolstered by
problematic metaphors around connection. From metaphors such as
"networks" to "contagion", Bollmer takes us on a fascinating journey in
and around the messy relationality between technology, desire and
humans. This book puts the complex human and beyond-human dimensions of
social media in context historically and conceptually in ways that are
both poetic and inspiring." -  Larissa Hjorth, RMIT Distinguished
Professor School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia