Professor John Naughton is an Irish academic and journalist based in Cambridge who is also well-known as a historian of the internet. His new book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet, is published this month by Quercus Books.
Buy From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg at the Guardian bookshop
"I've been an academic and a journalist all my working life, so you could say I've got a foot in both graves, as my famous countryman, Conor Cruise O'Brien, used to say. Unusually for someone working in UK newspapers, though, I'm also an engineer – a profession generally patronised by British media elites which in the 1990s used to deride the internet as 'the Citizen Band radio de nos jours' (as a leading newspaper editor put it to me once). Irritated by the ignorance implicit in this, I wrote A Brief History of the Future which told the story of how the internet came about. And this in turn led to many conversations over the years with politicians, policymakers and business leaders. What astonished me in these conversations, as the internet morphed from something exotic (like space travel) to something mundane (like mains electricity), was the extent to which it was misunderstood – even by people who were otherwise knowledgeable and well-informed. So, in the end, I asked myself the question: what would you really need to know in order to understand the significance of the internet? The answer is that you need to understand a smallish number of Big Ideas. But how many? Then I remembered a famous paper published by the psychologist George Miller which argued that on average people can hold seven discrete ideas (plus or minus two) in short-term memory. This led to the idea of a book with nine chapters – the nine things you really need to know about the net. If you're interested, it's a good idea to read the following 10 books as well."
1. The Internet Galaxy by Manuel Castells
Manuel Castells is the leading sociologist of cyberspace, and much of his scholarly writing is hard going for amateurs. But this volume, distilled from a series of lectures he gave in Oxford, provides the best overview we have of the internet phenomenon.
2. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
A self-conscious tribute to Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations became capitalism's bible, with its argument that free market economies are more productive and beneficial than any of the alternatives. Benkler's massive book is the most comprehensive analysis we have of the significance of "peer production," – creative activity enabled by the internet that takes place outside of the market system. Among the book's many attractions is the fact that if you don't want to buy it in the normal way from Yale University Press you can download the pdf free from benkler.org.
3. The Future of the Internet, and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
A great analysis by a Harvard legal scholar (and former geek) of how the internet came to be such an enabler of disruptive innovations – and a sobering treatise on how its success at disruption may contain the seeds of the network's destruction – or at any rate its "capture" by the established commercial and political order. Available from all good bookshops – or as a free pdf download from futureoftheinternet.org/
4. Transmission by Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru's second novel more or less single-handedly created a new genre – what one might call Geek Lit. One of its more striking features is the casual way it accepts the internet as the unremarkable, taken-for-granted background against which the adventures of its geek hero, Arjun Medha, are set.
5. Reamde by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson is the Thomas Pynchon of the internet, a writer of sprawling, compulsively readable, fiction with plots into which the network is inextricably woven. Reamde (a play on a common filename – Readme – in computer systems) takes in online gaming, cybercrime, MI6 and the Russian mafia, inter alia, in an intriguing blend of thriller and nerdy realism. Unusually for a novelist, Stephenson is also very knowledgeable about computing. His essay about Linux, In the Beginning was the Command Line, for example, is a terrific read.
6. You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
If you wanted a powerful antidote to technological utopianism then this manifesto is it. What gives it its special power is the fact that Lanier is not your average technophobe. On the contrary: he was one of the pioneers of Virtual Reality (VR) technology in the 1980s and later became a developer of medical applications of VR. He is also a composer who has recorded with artists like John Lennon and Philip Glass. So his tirade against the dehumanising, dumbing-down impacts of networked technology – as in the way "Remix culture" is parasitic on genuine creative activity, for example – is well-informed and acute, as are his attacks on "hive mind" and what he calls "Digital Maoism".
7. Republic.com by Cass Sunstein
Technological optimists see the internet as a prime enabler of a free market in ideas, a space in which anyone can have access to the best thinking and the best arguments. But sceptics like Cass Sunstein see the burgeoning technologies of "personalisation" – the software that enables Amazon to make recommendations specially tailored for you, or the filtering systems that enable you to construct the "Daily Me" from a set of RSS feeds from sites of which you approve – as a countervailing force heading in a different direction. They foresee an online world in which you see only what you want to see and hear only what you want to hear – in other words the fragmentation of the internet into a multitude of ideological echo-chambers, a development which would be dangerous for democracy. And if you think that's a far-fetched fear, just look at the Tea Party in the US.
8. The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov
Another brisk, readable antidote to cyber-utopianism. Morozov is exceedingly unsentimental about the net. He doesn't buy the argument that it is intrinsically an emancipating technology, for example. On the contrary, the Chinese have already demonstrated that authoritarian regimes are perfectly capable of adapting it to their own ends, making full use of its potential for comprehensive surveillance. And he is also sceptical of the idea that important questions about politics and society can invariably be framed in terms of the network. Reading Morozov, one has the impression of a man busily setting up straw men for intensive target practice, but his book is provocative and disturbing nevertheless.
9. Darwin Among the Machines: the evolution of global intelligence by George Dyson
One of the most original and intriguing books of the last two decades. Dyson argues that intelligence is always an emergent phenomenon – that is, a property of whole systems that cannot be inferred from studying their components in isolation. Thus human intelligence "emerges" from a collection of unintelligent neurons. Dyson pushes this idea to what he sees as its logical conclusion: if the internet is (as indeed it is) a global system of densely interconnected computer networks – together with the intellects of their users – then this global system should exhibit a new kind of "collective intelligence" as an emergent property. It's a sobering – and exhilarating – thought.
10. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
The best book yet written on the fundamental contradiction implicit in our emerging networked environment. We have Intellectual Property (IP) laws framed in an era when copying was degenerative, difficult and expensive and are trying to apply them to an era in which copying is perfect, easy, ubiquitous and free. As someone once observed, copying is to digital technology as breathing is to animal life. Lessig argues that not only is the attempt to put the IP genie back into the bottle misguided and futile, but it will turn out to be economically foolish as well because it will exclude us from the creative possibilities of digital technology. An intriguing and thought-provoking read.
