In this important, clear, and lucid book, Boast elucidates and explains the emergence of digital encoding, and helps the lay reader bridge the gap between what actually occurs inside our hardware and what we experience in the ubiquitous world of the interface . . . Marx wrote that a properly critical history of technology would show how little technological inventions are the work of any single individual. Boast’s book does just that: what is most striking is the manner in which digitality – perhaps the paramount technical concept of our age – was never expressly invented, but emerged from an almost natural process of production. We may not know what our writing does, as Kittler would have it, but this does not mean that we must imbue our information systems with vapoury mysticism. Digitality is, indeed, nothing but a code, and Boast’s book is a marvellously engaging critical history of that code.
James Draney
Review31
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. Recommended.
R. Kline, Cornell University
Choice
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.
Professor Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, author of A Geology of Media and What is Media Archaeology?