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.
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There’s at least one person writing a more socially focused book on Wikipedia, Andrew Lih, though I don’t know enough about it yet to say how close to what you’re thinking of it will end up being.
Bill McGowan - Charismatic workaholic Chairman of MCI for many years during its high growth period - when asked why there weren’t any books about the turmoil years of the battles with ATT, with the FCC, with the DoJ, replied “We don’t write history, we make it”.
It was not until 1986 that Larry Kahaner’s book ‘On The Line’ was publshed, chronicling the crazy years from the 1960 original Jack Goeken start-up, through to 1984. Crazy years that had MCI radically transform and transfuse a 100-year old monopoly industry, and catalyze new directions for PTTs around the globe.