Associate:
„The project pursues a historical praxeology of digitally networked media that foregrounds specific technoeconomic trajectories since 1989. We situate co-operative data practices, business models and infrastructures of capturing, monitoring and environing within advertising and sensor networks.“
In an interview with the Institute for Network Cultures, Sebastian Gießmann, PI of A01: History of Digitally Networked Media between Specialization and Universalization, answers questions about his newly published book on credit cards and discusses the theory of digital payments.
→ You can read the interview here (in German)
In addition to his recently published and critically acclaimed work Das Kreditkarten-Buch (2026), Sebastian Gießmann’s publications include his earlier book Netze und Netzwerke from 2015, which has been translated and published in 2024 as The Connectivity of Things. Furthermore, as part of his habilitation process, he will now deliver his public inaugral lecture at the University of Cologne. All interested parties are cordially invited to attend.
The lecture is titled: “Anthropic Studies: Media Cultures under the Conditions of Artificial Intelligence”
About the lecture
The introductory lecture proposes, through the lens of Anthropic Studies, a situated examination of current, neo-connectivist artificial intelligence. It adopts a symmetrical perspective that draws on both media and cultural studies as well as Science and Technology Studies. The works of Susan Leigh Star and Phil Agre serve as theoretical reference points here. Isn’t “AI” the most ambiguous borderline object that computer science has ever produced? If we are to survive the current super-controversy surrounding AI and its planetary consequences, we must first situate the technology within its institutional ecologies and grammars of trade. Enter the scene: Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic. The prompt for the lecture is: “Tell us a little about your state of mind, Claude.”
June 10, 2026, 4:00 p.m. (s.t.)
University of Cologne
Faculty of Philosophy
Seminar Building (106), 1st Floor, Room S11
Universitätsstr. 37, 50931 Cologne
History and Theory of Digital Payment
by Sebastian Gießmann (Universität Siegen, SFB)
In his latest publication, Sebastian Gießmann demonstrates how seemingly mundane practices—such as paying at the supermarket or via an app—transform into complex media practices. Digital payment emerges not merely as a technical innovation, but as a political arena in which issues of consumption, control, and the future of cash are being renegotiated.
About the Book
Cash or card? Or perhaps an app or blockchain? Sebastian Gießmann’s fast-paced history of the credit card takes us into the hidden worlds of digital payments. For the first time, it reveals how our digital present in North America began with a small plastic card, what magnetic stripes and chips actually mean, and how Europe could one day become a leader in digital payments. Gießmann elegantly guides readers into the secret inner workings of banks, credit card organizations, and computerized high-tech security. He acknowledges the everyday nature of transactions as well as the absurd “true crimes” of credit card fraud. The Credit Card Book explores the truth behind advertising slogans, company logos, and TV commercials. How we pay is political. Social participation and difference, consumption, financial surveillance, the future of cash: nothing less than our economic identity is at stake in digital payments.
“A brilliant study in media and cultural studies—methodologically groundbreaking and empirically rigorous.” – Anna Echterhölter
Sebastian Giessmann is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen and PI of A01 “Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization” of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 – “Media of Cooperation.”About the author
The 2025 RESAW Conference: Data, Communities, and Food … for Thoughts
by Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg & CRC 1187)
The 2025 edition of the RESAW conference marked a significant milestone: the tenth anniversary of a vibrant and constantly evolving academic community. Since its inception in 2015, this conference series has brought together researchers, archivists, and practitioners from diverse fields concerned with the history and present of the web. This year’s event was memorable, not only because of the anniversary, but also due to the remarkable richness of the exchanges, the diversity of its participants, and the depth of the contributions. RESAW joined forces with the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC 1187) Media of Cooperation, both coming together to study The Datafied Web and to preserve its histories.
About the RESAW conference and community
RESAW is the acronym for A REsearch Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials. The RESAW community is dedicated to working with digital cultural heritage and gathers every two years at the eponymous RESAW conference. RESAW was founded in 2012 with the goal of building a collaborative European research infrastructure for studying and working with web materials while fostering knowledge exchange across Europe. This presents significant challenges for both research and the archiving of web-based information and objects.
RESAW 2025 – The datafied Web at the University of Siegen
The conference drew close to one hundred participants from across Europe and North America. Among them were long-standing members of the community – some of whom have attended every edition since the beginning, as well as many newcomers, and notably from the CRC team at the University of Siegen. This mix created a dynamic and productive atmosphere, with new ideas and connections flourishing. It provided intellectual renewal and disciplinary cross-pollination.
The central theme, The Datafied Web, acted as a powerful conceptual anchor, encouraging reflection on how datafication has been and is reshaping the web, our methods, and our understanding of digital studies and web archives.
While many presentations were directly aligned with the theme, the conference also remained open to a wide array of topics beyond the scope of datafication. This flexibility is a longstanding strength of the event, allowing space for discussions of current research developments, methodological experimentation, and new discoveries in the fields of web archiving and web studies. Contributions ranged from updates on national and international web archiving initiatives to exploratory studies in platform studies or qualitative and quantitative methods.
RESAW set out to trace how the datafied web became the sensory media environment we now inhabit. A web of predictive suggestion, of per-user variation, of AI-generated aesthetic and ephemeral interfaces. A web where “what you see” is a product of where you clicked, what you hovered, which model you unknowingly trained. To study this web—and to preserve its histories—that is where the research agendas of Resaw and MoC come together. (Carolin Gerlitz, spokesperson of the CRC 1187)
A significant number of talks examined The Datafied Web through historical perspectives. These included case studies on the evolution of technologies such as the CD-ROM and Bluetooth, and their interaction with or transition into web-based platforms, shedding light on the frictions and continuities involved. Others focused on pressing current concerns, such as data surveillance, algorithmic governance, and the political economy of web and platform infrastructures.
The datafication of the web has brought about a decisive transformation of capitalism – and capitalist economies have in turn datafied the World Wide Web. Our current platform economies are based on the historical development of cookies, web advertising, and the measurement of public data. (Sebastian Gießman, head of the conference)
The interdisciplinary character of the conference was particularly evident this year. Approaches drawn from Web and Platform Studies, the History of Technology, Archival Studies, Digital Humanities, and Critical Data Studies were all present, and in fruitful dialogue. This interdisciplinarity was reflected not only in the themes discussed, but also in the methods employed: from close analysis to distant and scalable reading, and from infrastructure-focused studies to content-based investigations. Such methodological diversity illustrates the richness of the field and the necessity of hybrid approaches to fully grasp the complexities of the web’s past, present and future.
The keynote addresses were among the highlights of the conference. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup’s keynote offered a historically grounded presentation on the theme of data loss, linking it to broader narratives of memory, preservation, and forgetting in the digital age. Jonathan Gray’s keynote, by contrast, was more oriented toward the present and near future, addressing the stakes of open data, and the role of researchers in shaping ethical and inclusive data practices.
Beyond the formal sessions, a variety of pre-workshops, social events, and targeted meetings enriched the experience. Early-career researchers were given space to receive feedback and engage in mentoring dialogues. Pre-conference workshops offered hands-on methodological training and collaborative problem-solving. Roundtables tackled timely and strategic questions, such as the future of our scholarly RESAW network, and the challenges of studying datafication in the opening roundtable. (A personal conference trip report by Lesley Frew that focuses on her experience and some of the sessions is also available).
Of particular note was the attention paid to the epistemological and methodological implications of working with web data. Whether focusing on the politics of web archiving, the limits of data transparency, or the possibilities of algorithmic critique, many sessions interrogated not only what we know, but how we come to know it and what remains excluded or erased in the process. Case studies drawn from diverse geographical, historical and linguistic contexts further enriched these discussions, reminding us of the web’s heterogeneity and the need for grounded, situated and reflexive perspectives.
In conclusion, the 2025 conference was more than just a commemoration of ten years of scholarly exchange and conferences. It was a powerful reaffirmation of the value of community, dialogue, and interdisciplinary collaboration in the face of a rapidly evolving digital landscape and more generally world. The themes explored, the connections made, and the questions raised will no doubt continue to inspire work in the years to come.
We would like to sincerely thank again all the local organisers, all the participants who made this edition such a success, as well as the DFG and FNR, the University of Siegen, the CRC Media of Cooperation, and the C2DH at the University of Luxembourg for their support to this event.
The 2025 RESAW conference was organized by the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen in cooperation with the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg. The conference is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR).
More
Press release by the University’s Press Office →
Conference report by Lesley Frew →
Executive summary
In its third term, the media-historical subproject reconstructs the development of new web and internet technologies since 1989. On the one hand, its case studies are devoted to the computerization of physical environments through specialized wireless technologies, in particular Bluetooth. On the other, they trace the universalization of individualized web-based advertising in the transition from “Web” to “Web 2.0.” Both subject areas – advertising and sensor networks – are conceived in terms of the practices, business models, and infrastructures of capturing, monitoring, and environing that are generated within them. To this end, the project follows up on the work of computer scientist Philip E. Agre in media theory and data criticism, while at the same time shedding new light on his hitherto undervalued work. By turning to Agre’s work, the project’s final term pursues a political economy of digitally networked media that explains the reciprocal fabrication of data-intensive media between practices of capturing, monitoring, and environing. The historiographical work of this project focuses on the universalizations by which the perpetual capturing of personal data has become the normalized basis of Internet-based economies.
In methodological terms, the project is situated between historical praxeology, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of computing and networking. It develops new digital historiographic methods that deal with materials of a “born-digital cultural heritage” that shed a critical light on case studies on both advertising networks and sensor networks. In its third term, the project aims to synthesize the historical intersection of economy and digitally networked media. At the same time, it historically contextualizes the way digital cultures deal with everyday forms of surveillance that, in an interplay between monitoring and capturing, make a lasting mark on socio-technical media environments in the 21st century.
Historical Praxeology following the practice turn approach in media studies
Environing: Bluetooth Practices
Monitoring: Advertising Networks and the Web
Capturing: Rethinking (with) Philip E. Agre
Infrastructural Inversion in Media History
➔ Find the project archive 2020–2023 here
Das Kreditkarten-Buch.
Geschichte und Theorie des digitalen Bezahlens
Would you like to pay in cash or by card? Or perhaps via an app orblockchain? In his fast-paced history of the credit card, Sebastian Giessmann takes us into the hidden world of digital payments. For the first time, the credit card book reveals how our digital present beganin North America with a small plastic card. What do magnetic stripes and chips actually mean, and how did Europe come to lose its lead in digital payments? Giessmann elegantly guides readers into the secretive inner workings of banks, credit card organisations, and computerised high-tech security systems. He pays tribute to the everyday nature of transactions, as well as the absurd ‘true crimes’ of credit card fraud. This book about credit cards asks us to consider the truth behind advertising slogans, company logos and TV commercials. The way we pay is political. Social participation and difference, consumption, financial surveillance and the future of cash are all at stake in digital payments — nothing less than our economic identity.
Gießmann, Sebastian. 2026. Das Kreditkartenbuch: Geschichte und Theorie des Digitalen Bezahlens. Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag. ISBN: 978-3-86599-604-6 .
Projekt Alexandria.
Medienhistorische Einblicke in das frühe World Wide Web
Between 1993 and 1995, “Project Alexandria” at CERN had the ambitious goal of establishing a World Wide Web organization with the W3O. Marcus M. Rommel provides the first well-founded empirical insights into the project and evaluates it in terms of media history. Rich archive material from CERN shows the developments of the early web and underlines Europe's significant contribution to its standardization and technical development - and also reveals the secret of why the project was ultimately not pursued.
Rommel, Marcus M. 2025. Projekt Alexandria. Medienhistorische Einblicke in das frühe World Wide Web. Locating Media | Situierte Medien. Bielefeld: transcript.
The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English.
Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more.
Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking turned into a veritable cultural technique, Giessmann takes readers below the street to the Parisian sewers and to the Suez Canal, into the telephone exchanges of Northeast America, and on to the London Underground. His brilliant history explains why social networks were discovered late, how the rapid rise of mathematical network theory was able to take place, how improbable the invention of the internet was, and even what diagrams and conspiracy theories have to do with it all. A primer on networking as a cultural technique, this translated German classic explains everything one ever could wish to know about networks.
Gießmann, Sebastian. 2024. The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832. Infrastructures. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.
ZfM 29 „Test“
This issue of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft asks how media and tests constitute each other. Particular attention is paid to the politics of testing. We propose to understand tests as open situations in which socio-technical evaluations are made and decisions are taken using partly established standards and partly standards that only become established during testing. For a media cultural studies concept of the test, the following applies: in the micro-decisions of distributed and distributive testing, the social itself is put to the test. The articles collected in this issue make this clear: No test without media - no medium without a test.
Gießmann, Sebastian; Gerlitz, Carolin (Eds.). 2023. “Test: Einleitung in den Schwerpunkt”. In: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. Jg. 15, Heft 29 (2/2023): 10–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20051.
