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The Internet is the most remarkable achievement of humankind
since the pyramids. A millennium from now, historians will look back at it and
marvel that a people equipped with such clumsy tools succeeded in creating such
a leviathan.
Yet even as the Net pervades our lives, we begin to take it for
granted. Many have lost the capacity for wonder. Most of us have no idea where
the Internet came from, how it works, or who created it and why. And even fewer
have any idea of what it means for society and the future. John
Naughton has written a warm and passionate book whose heroes are the visionaries
who laid the foundations of the postmodern world. A Brief History of the Future
celebrates the engineers and scientists who implemented their dreams in hardware
and software and explains the values and ideas that drove them. Although its subject
seems technical, the book in fact is personal. John Naughton writes about the
Net the way Nick Hornby writes about soccer -- as a part of life, and as a key
influence on his own voyage from solitary child to established academic and writer.
A Brief History of the Future is an intimate celebration of vision and
altruism, ingenuity and determination, and above all of the power to change the
world. John Naughton is an academic and journalist.
He teaches at the Open University and has written an award-winning weekly column
for the Observer for more than ten years. He lives in Cambridge and is a fellow
of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. |
