Narrative and netheads
There are wonderful books about the story of the internet’s and web’s development. I’m thinking of Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine, Katie Hafner’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late, biographies of Norbert Weiner, John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web. Lots of them.
Now there are newer books about the social changes online, like David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everyone (coming out soon), the wonderful Cluetrain Manifesto.
There’s a gap. We need more narratives about people and new online efforts - John Battelle’s The Search is excellent, but it’s more about “search” than people. Who is tracking the cultural history of the development of YouTube or Wikipedia (the people involved, the drama)? Who is interviewing the people who dreamed up Dopplr and Facebook?
Maybe it’s all happening too quickly, and it’s clear we’re just at the very beginning. We’ll need these stories, though, just as we needed the stories about the early internet engineers. It’s true that groups and collective action are vital, and that’s what we’re hearing about right now, but there are also (always) personal stories of effort, invention, and unworkable (at the time) ideas that we’ll need to capture.
So take notes.