ABSTRACT
If humanities-based disciplines teach us how to read content that appears on the surface of discrete media technologies (what I call a horizontal reading practice) and if materialist media studies teach us how to read individual media technologies by descending down through layers of hardware and software functionalities (what I call a vertical reading practice), what if we more explicitly combine both approaches to offer up accounts of complex, connected technologies such as networks? In this chapter, I experiment with developing a methodology for reading networks by focusing specifically on the protocol Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) – the engine that drives “the internet,” the term we use to refer to the largest internet in the world, and which consists of the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. My reading treats TCP/IP as a case study in reading networks insofar as I work both horizontally, moving freely across disciplines and across a wide range of documents on the protocol; and vertically, moving from the surface where these same documents reside down to the underlying technical specs of the protocol. This methodology could be used to read any number of networks that may have preceded the internet or that currently exist on or outside of the internet.
