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.

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.

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.

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.