Where will communications networks take us? Will the Internet destroy our privacy, topple governments, transform education and the media, foster world peace or bring about the extinction of the human race at the hands of intelligent machines?
The new book “Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives” explores provocative questions about changes wrought by the information technology revolution. Author Janna Quitney Anderson, a researcher for the Pew Internet & American Life Project and director of Internet projects in the Elon University School of Communications, samples the wit and wisdom of the world’s leading technology gurus, zeroing in on predictions about the Internet’s future and putting that imagined future in perspective.
Interlaced with revealing analysis, the book weaves together thoughts of hundreds of stakeholders and skeptics, including Bill Gates, Bruce Sterling, Nicholas Negroponte, Al Gore, Clifford Stoll, John Perry Barlow and many others. Anderson looks at the social, political and economic consequences of new communication technology, illustrating the serious impact of pervasive networks and how they will change our lives over the next century.
Anderson’s book is a companion to the “Imagining the Internet” site (www.elon.edu/predictions). The book’s foreword is by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project and former managing editor of U.S. News & World Report. The site includes a research report jointly released by Elon and the Pew Project in January 2005 that received worldwide attention, led by stories in the New York Times and CNN.com. Nearly 100,000 copies of the study have been downloaded.
The book is being lauded by technology pioneers and journalists: “Janna Anderson offers a great perspective on the history and future of the Internet,” says Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft who led the National Science Foundation’s Information Superhighway Initiative. “Good books come from thorough research … Being a part of and having the last word in this fine past-and-future Internet chronicle is a real honor,” Bell says.
CNN technology writer Christine Boese says the book “is packed with interesting facts and milestones.” Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain says, “Janna Anderson illuminates with great clarity the history, dreams and challenges of the Internet, which allow the reader to see glimpses of the future; a wonderful and important contribution.”
In his foreword, Rainie praises the work that led to this book. “Of all the things we have done, nothing has taught us as much and made us think as expansively as this effort,” Rainie says. “We are very grateful to Janna Quitney Anderson, her Elon University colleagues, and their students for their dogged, shoe-leather work in tracking these predictions down—and for the synthesis and analysis Anderson shares in this book.”
The book is available online from the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield (August 2005, 256 pages, $27.95) and at other major online booksellers, including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
About the author
Janna Quitney Anderson is assistant professor and director of Internet projects at Elon University’s School of Communications. Her expertise is concentrated in the fields of Internet history; the future of the Internet; and print/online journalism. She has directed several major studies for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, building the Internet Predictions Database (www.elon.edu/predictions) and its various research components and completing an ethnographic study of the use of the internet by small-town families (www.elon.edu/pew/oneweek/). Anderson joined the faculty at Elon in 1999, following a 20-year career as an editor and reporter for daily newspapers in Minnesota and North Dakota. She has written articles for the New York Times News Service, USA Today, Newspaper Research Journal, Operant Subjectivity and Advertising Age. She is a co-author of the 2005 Pew Internet report “The Future of the Internet,” and is currently working on a follow-up survey to that report.
Sample chapters from the book
From Bonfires and Bongos to the Web: People crave and benefit from connections, spurring communications networks to evolve. A comparative history of the developmental similarities of the telegraph, radio, television, telephone, and Internet.
The “Highway” Metaphor: Finding a way to tell (and sell) how the Internet could be changing lives. A comparison to the development of the transportation network of the United States, and a look at how the catchphrase was developed and spread and what it might mean for the Internet and society.
Knocking the Net: Some warn the Internet is naughty, anti-nature, and nefarious; even supporters see negatives. Were the Luddites right? Problems accompany any new technology. A look at how technology has been perceived throughout modern history and how that ties in to statements about the Internet.
Nothing is Certain but Death and Taxes: And some predictions – including the death of taxes – may have been premature. In the awe stage of the Internet, people predicted that it would bring the end of the book, the CD, the recording industry, TV, e-mail, mainframe computers, copyright law, big corporations, political parties, conventional schools, commuting to work, major urban centers, and all institutions, behaviors and values that arose in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
The Threat to Freedom; to the Earth: As communications networks become all-seeing, thinkers/theorists expect Big Brother or a robot takeover. Some foretell an age of invisible robots that could decide humankind is unnecessary. From “intelligent agents” to biological/network robots, people in the 1990s were expressing optimism and fear about the potential of intelligent networks.
The Future of Networks: Some theorists believe networked intelligence will evolve into an omniscient “godmind.”
Hmm, Will It Happen?: These predictions did not come true or seem unlikely to come to pass. Historic short-sighted predictions from people who should have known better (doubters made pronouncements against the telephone, airplanes, radio, talking movies, computers, and the Windows operating system), followed by some statements made in the awe stage of the Internet that were off the beam.