Other Networks

The internet as we know it is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the present corporatized, monolithic, surveilled state of our networked communications is just one possibility out of many, and there is radical promise in uncovering hidden alternatives: from pirate radio to barbed wire telegraph, from synthesizers transmitted over the telephone to encoded messages bounced off the surface of the moon. Other Networks is writer and researcher Lori Emerson’s speculative index of communications networks that existed before or outside of the internet: digital as well as analog, IRL as well as imagined, state-sponsored systems of control as well as homebrew communities in the footnotes of hacker culture. Featuring explanatory descriptions of each network, archival images, and original artwork by Robert Beatty, Other Networks documents historically alternative networks with a particular eye towards their experimental usage by artists and writers. The result is a boldly creative taxonomy of our networked world, a liberatory sourcebook for readers eager to escape the hegemony of technological history, and a lovingly designed guide to the freedoms and communal possibilities that have been lost along the way.

Lori Emerson is an Associate Professor in the Media Studies Department, Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab, and Director of the Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022) and author of Reading Writing Interfaces (2014). Her research focuses on uncovering crisis points in past media, points at which there was the possibility—even if never fully realized—for technologies that are definitively “other” than those we have now. She also deconstructs narratives of how contemporary technologies came to be by looking at artists' and writers’ experiments with network technologies.