John Naughton is Vice-President of Wolfson College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University. He is also an Observer columnist and a prominent blogger at memex.naughtons.org. His new book is From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.One of Naughton's top ten books about the internet, as told to the Guardian:
Republic.com by Cass SunsteinRead about the other books on Naughton's list.
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 Sunsteinsee 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.
Also see Lev Grossman's list of five books about the World Wide Web.
--Marshal Zeringue
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