How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

The telegraph and the telephone were the first electrical communications networks to become hallmarks of modernity. Yet they were not initially expected to achieve universal accessibility. In this pioneering history of their evolution, Richard R. John demonstrates how access to these networks was determined not only by technological imperatives and economic incentives but also by political decision making at the federal, state, and municipal levels. In the decades between the Civil War and the First World War, Western Union and the Bell System emerged as the dominant providers for the telegraph and telephone. Both operated networks that were products not only of technology and economics but also of a distinctive political economy. Western Union arose in an antimonopolistic political economy that glorified equal rights and vilified special privilege. The Bell System flourished in a progressive political economy that idealized public utility and disparaged unnecessary waste. The popularization of the telegraph and the telephone was opposed by business lobbies that were intent on perpetuating specialty services. In fact, it wasnÕt until 1900 that the civic ideal of mass access trumped the elitist ideal of exclusivity in shaping the commercialization of the telephone. The telegraph did not become widely accessible until 1910, sixty-five years after the first fee-for-service telegraph line opened in 1845. Network Nation places the history of telecommunications within the broader context of American politics, business, and discourse. This engrossing and provocative book persuades us of the critical role of political economy in the development of new technologies and their implementation.

In Network Nations, Michele Hilmes reveals and re-conceptualizes the roots of media globalization through a historical look at the productive transnational cultural relationship between British and American broadcasting. Though frequently painted as opposites--the British public service tradition contrasting with the American commercial system--in fact they represent two sides of the same coin. Neither could have developed without the constant presence of the other, in terms not only of industry and policy but of aesthetics, culture, and creativity, despite a long history of oppositional rhetoric. Based on primary research in British and American archives, Network Nations argues for a new transnational approach to media history, looking across the traditional national boundaries within which media is studied to encourage an awareness that media globalization has a long and fruitful history. Placing media history in the framework of theories of nationalism and national identity, Hilmes examines critical episodes of transnational interaction between the US and Britain, from radio’s amateurs to the relationship between early network heads; from the development of radio features and drama to television spy shows and miniseries; as each other’s largest suppliers of programming and as competitors on the world stage; and as a network of creative, business, and personal relationships that has rarely been examined, but that shapes television around the world. As the global circuits of television grow and as global regions, particularly Europe, attempt to define a common culture, the historical role played by the British/US media dialogue takes on new significance.

The defining document and standard reference for the field of computer mediated communication (CMC)

**FINALIST, 2022 PROSE Award in Theology & Religious Studies** An innovative exploration of religion's influence on communication networks When Samuel Morse sent the words “what hath God wrought” from the US Supreme Court to Baltimore in mere minutes, it was the first public demonstration of words travelling faster than human beings and farther than a line of sight in the US. This strange confluence of media, religion, technology, and US nationhood lies at the foundation of global networks. The advent of a telegraph cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean was viewed much the way the internet is today, to herald a coming world-wide unification. President Buchanan declared that the Atlantic Telegraph would be “an instrument destined by divine providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world” through which “the nations of Christendom [would] spontaneously unite.” Evangelical Protestantism embraced the new technology as indicating God’s support for their work to Christianize the globe. Public figures in the US imagined this new communication technology in primarily religious terms as offering the means to unite the world and inspire peaceful relations among nations. Religious utopianists saw the telegraph as the dawn of a perfect future. Religious framing thus dominated the interpretation of the technology’s possibilities, forging an imaginary of networks as connective, so much so that connection is now fundamental to the idea of networks. In reality, however, networks are marked, at core, by disconnection. With lively historical sources and an accessible engagement with critical theory, When the Medium was the Mission tells the story of how connection was made into the fundamental promise of networks, illuminating the power of public Protestantism in the first network imaginaries, which continue to resonate today in false expectations of connection.

'Nation Branding' is a comprehensive text that demonstrates why nations are embracing the principles of brand management. It clearly explains how the concepts and techniques of branding can be adapted to the context of nations - as opposed to the more usual context of products, services, or companies.

This book explains the transformation of the nation into a cosmonation (or multisite nation) through the reunification of the homeland with its diaspora. The book elaborates on how the mechanisms of linkages, connections, and networking interact to form distributed sites of homeland and diaspora into a cosmonation and how diasporans in different units of such a crossborder social formation, wherever they relocate, relate to each other. The ensemble thereby functions as a cultural and political collectivity manifested through cultural traditions, inter-site familial, institutional, and associational ties, transnational solidarity, and reverence for the ancestral homeland.

This book deals with transnationalism and captures its singularity as a generalized phenomenon. The profusion of transnational communities is a factor of fluidity in social orders and represents confrontations between contingencies and basic socio-cultural drives. It has created a new era different from the past at essential respects. This is an age of enriching cultural diversity fraught with threatening risks inextricably linked to contemporary globalization. National sovereignty is eroded from above by global processes, from below by aspirations of sub-national groups, and from the sides - by transnational allegiances. This is the backdrop against which this book delves into the fundamental issues relating to the nature, scope and overall significance of transnationalism.

An authoritative collection of leading critical and contemporary writings published in the field of technology and organizations. The set spans a 50-year time period taking the reader from the first and most influential papers from the early 1950s through to some recent publications which address contemporary and emerging debates in the field at the dawn of the 21st century. Each of the 4 volumes has a particular focus upon this area of research and scholarship: the early debates; theories, paradigms and concepts; critical empirical studies; and emerging themes and future debates. The editors provide an introduction to, and overview of, the themes, debates, perspectives, theories and paradigms which characterize this area of organization studies, and set out a "route map" to help guide the reader through the four volumes.