{"product_id":"world-projects-book-markus-krajewski-9780816683512","title":"World Projects","description":"\u003cp\u003eMarkus Krajewski is emerging as a leading scholar in the field of media archaeology, which seeks to trace cultural history through the media networks that enable and structure it. In \u003cem\u003eWorld Projects\u003c\/em\u003e he opens a new portal into the history of globalization by examining several large-scale projects that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, shared a grand yet unachievable goal: bringing order to the world. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing from a broad array of archival materials, Krajewski reveals how expanding commercial relations, growing international scientific agreements, and an imperial monopolization of the political realm spawned ambitious global projects. \u003cem\u003eWorld Projects \u003c\/em\u003econtends that the late nineteenth-century networks of cables, routes, and shipping lines-of junctions, crossovers, and transfers-merged into a “multimedia system” that was a prerequisite for conceiving a world project. As examples, he presents the work of three big-thinking “plansmiths,” each of whose work mediates between two discursive fields: the chemist and natural philosopher Wilhelm Ostwald, who spent years promoting a “world auxiliary language” and a world currency; the self-taught “engineer” and self-anointed authority on science and technology Franz Maria Feldhaus, who labored to produce an all-encompassing “world history of technology”; and Walther Rathenau, who put economics to the service of politics and quickly transformed the German economy. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith a keen eye for the outlandish as well as the outsized, Krajewski shows how media, technological structures, and naked human ambition paved the way for global-scale ventures that together created the first “world wide web.”\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52705209778449,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52705209876753,"sku":"GOR014588527","price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780816683512.jpg?v=1785781633","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/world-projects-book-markus-krajewski-9780816683512","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}