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Reviews

Publishing a book is an arrogant act.  It implies that you think your ideas are worth someone else's attention.   Reviews are a salutary antidote.  Here are links to notices I know about -- good, bad and indifferent. 

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"Under the Net" 
by Bryan Appleyard
New Statesman, 4 October 1999

A long and thoughtful review.  Appleyard is a well-known writer with a wide range of interests.  He has written extensively on the relationship between science and society.  His review gives a good summary of the book, but is sceptical about my general stance -- which Appleyard describes as "anarchic liberalism".  This, in his view, prevents me from asking "the big, serious questions about what we will become as a result of the net.   Merely yelling 'freedom'  does not amount to philosophical, sociological or philosophical analysis".  He's right, of course.  And he thinks my writing style "can be appalling".  Sigh.

"Art in bits: shake hands with a global tapestry of folk creativity"
by Peter Forbes
The Guardian, 2 October 1999   

 This is a very generous review which uses the book as a platform for some interesting speculation about the impact of the Net.  "Now and forever", writes Forbes, "the sum of human knowledge is searchable. ... The Net is a gigantic folk-art tapestry. Perhaps it is bringing an end to the unfettered individualism of  Renaissance, Romantic and Modernist man".  Forbes is also very good on the collective power of the Net.  It is, he says, "almost like the chain reaction of a nuclear explosion, but this one is benign. It does have a Borgesian dimension: that of a labyrinthine library in which everyone is simultaneously borrowing the books, editing them personally and republishing them".  Most authors would kill for a notice like this. 
"High techie vision"
by Keith Blackmore
The Times, 9 October 1999		 A generally complimentary review written by someone who describes himself as being, like me, "an Internet bore".  The world may not be crying out for a book like this, he writes, " but Naughton is surely right to think it a task worth undertaking. And for a while, he manages to make the strange, almost accidental, birth of this amazing technology sound almost interesting while keeping his own slightly techie admiration for the key scientists and engineers in check".

Blackmore thinks that I do okay when writing about my personal obsessions, but then things start to go downhill. "Gradually,... his enthusiasm gets the better of him and before you know it the greybeard loon is back. Naughton's discourse becomes no less worthy or, for all I know, less well researched. It just becomes less interesting. By page 113, for example, he is busy telling us that 'Revolutions also occur in technology as in science, and they are just as traumatic because communities do not lightly abandon their paradigms'. Why is this, he wonders, missing the obvious answer: who cares? "

This made my family laugh, which suggests that Blackmore is on to something.  My obsession with Thomas Kuhn, you see, is not universally shared.
"Finding Order in the Muddle of the Internet"
by Andrew Brown
The Independent, 6 October 1999		 Andrew Brown writes an engaging column about the Net in the New Statesman. He's also the author of The Darwin Wars, an interesting book about the intellectual warfare between the evolutionary theories of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. (Here's the site he did for the book, which also includes some reviews.)  Andrew is interested in technology, but not over-awed by it.   As a result, he's very convincing.  I bought an Ericsson SH888 mobile phone, for example, on his recommendation, having rejected the same advice from countless techies. 

  His review of A Brief History is characteristically wry, penetrating and sometimes embarrassingly complimentary.  "Naughton's book", he says, "explains more clearly than anything I have read how the technology turned to magic.  Because he loves it himself, and keeps a sense of wonder, he can tell the story as an engineer would -- ... as a search for elegant solutions to complicated technical problems".

  On the other hand, Andrew is sceptical (like lots of other reviewers) of my admiration of the Net's not-for-profit ethos and my confidence that it will endure.  "I only wish he were right", he concludes, but it's clear that he fears I'm wrong.
"Going Global"
by Mark Edwards
Sunday Times 31 October 1999		 One of the reasons I wrote the book was to rescue those who created the Internet from "the condescension of posterity".  Looks like I failed.  This friendly, well-written review by Mark Edwards of A Brief History and Patricia Wallace's The Psychology of the Internet oozes condescension with its imputation that I am a nostalgic idealist in love with a world that is passing into oblivion.  "The Internet as an object of technological wonder, as a glowing example of people working together in harmony for no thought for personal gain, is history", he writes.  "For the countless hordes arriving on the internet now, thanks to free access courtesy of high-street names such as Dixons, it's ancient history.  These people have come to shop".

  Of course the Web is a new way of shopping and doing business, but most people who take Edwards's cynical view of it invariably fall into the trap of thinking that it's just a new kind of billion-channel television. The whole distinction between 'push' and 'pull' media eludes them.  Edwards falls headlong into the same trap.  "The internet", he writes towards the end of his piece, "is television squared".  Oh yeah?

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