The only books I buy new anymore are beautiful things that appeal to my niche interests, which might become unavailable because they are niche… so my pre-ordered copy of Lori Emerson’s new book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook arrived today.
Lori Emerson is one of the few people really prominently writing seriously in a media studies/anthropological sort of way about the history of technology, and I constantly assert that there isn’t enough of that, so I’m excited to see a win.
I found her via the press for her first book, Reading Writing Interfaces, which is fabulous and thought provoking (and I only have a handful of quibbles with it, mostly around promulgating some of Apple’s dubious self-centering history that they seeded to writers and journalists in the 90s, even where she clearly knows better) and have followed her online posts as she prepared this one – We even interacted online once or twice in those; I’m acknowledged in her piece The Net Has Never Been Neutral that didn’t end up in the book because of a conversation we had online about how different parts of the audience would understand the world “Neutral” in subtly and problematically different ways when she posted an earlier version.
At a skim, Other Networks is much less densely academic and analytical than Reading Writing Interfaces; it really is a sourcebook of curated examples of technologies and instances of those technologies, with the necessary breadcrumbs to set up the interesting properties and comparisons with others. I’m a little disappointed that some of the deep musings about other ways the thing that is the Internet could have been largely didn’t make it in to the book, but, from an editorial view, they are different content for a different audience than what it ended up being.
It is also beautiful; the binding and the typesetting and the illustrations, right down to this lovely little foiled glyph on the back cover. My copy is sitting next to Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens, which is a benchmark for beautiful books, and it looks good.
