The Machine in the Ghost

"All that you wanted to know about the digital, and forgot to ask the telegraph operator. Robin Boast's smoothly flowing book offers a historically contextualised argument about our contemporary culture of computation that actually reveals it to be at least as much about encoding, tabulating and other techniques that connect the digital to a history of transmission. The Machine in the Ghost transports us to the 19th century and back via a whole lot of punched cards, coding and cybernetics - and much more. Boast is able to write with such flair that the book speaks to both academics and the general audience who want to understand the cultural history of our contemporary culture."--Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, author of A Geology of Media "Choice"
"This book presents a very good history of digitalization. Boast draws on his expertise in information science and anthropology to argue that the current digital age is best understood by separating it from computation to consider the long history of 'digitality, ' from the invention of Baudot's digital code for telegraphy in the late 19th century to the processing of similar codes by digital computers in the 20th century and the development of today's ubiquitous graphical interfaces. The Machine in the Ghost provides a welcome historical lineage to the celebrated convergence of telecommunications and computers in creating new media in the late 20th century. The book is written in a clear, popular-science language that enables undergraduate students in all majors to understand how today's digital infrastructure works, the information theory of Claude Shannon, and how digital media is different from all other media in regard to performativity. . . . Recommended."-- "Choice"