A History of the Internet and the Digital Future [Hardcover]

Johnny Ryan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1861897774 | ISBN-13: 978-1861897770 | Edition: 1

This book explores the trends that are shaping the businesses, politics, and media of the digital future. 
A great adjustment in human affairs is underway. Political, commercial and cultural life is changing from the centralized, hierarchical and standardized structures of the industrial age to something radically different: the economy of the emerging digital era. 
A History of the Internet and the Digital Future tells the story of the development of the Internet from the 1950s to the present, and explains how the Internet has revolutionized political campaigns; how the development of the World Wide Web enfranchised a new online population of assertive, niche consumers; and how the dot-com bust taught smarter firms to capitalize on the power of digital artisans.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is the best Western history of the Internet offered to date, but it is up to readers to connect the dots of where things may be headed."
Library Journal

"Understanding the trends driving this revolution is pivotal to success. Consider this book your road map to getting there." --Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com

"This is a must-read for both governments and companies who need to fully understand this shift in power." --Susanne Dirks, Leader, Global Center for Economic Development, IBM Institute for Business Value

"Johnny Ryan has admirably captured the sweep of the Internet's development from its earliest days." -- Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

"Ryan dissects the play of actors, the essence of their technical ideas, and the details of their activities with documentation and diligence, and even uncovers some discrepancies. He develops a narrative that I found intriguing, enlightening, and credible."
-Dave Crocker, The Internet Protocol Journal (Cisco)

"Ryan understands the power shift that the Internet is. If you see the Internet as Ryan does, you will understand how Craigslist kills newspapers, how Facebook rises from nothing and why everything is being invented anew."

(Phil Madsen, online politics pioneer (campaign manager of Jesse Ventura, 1998) )

"Ryan describes a fundamental shift and dispersion of power from traditional centres of power to the networked individual. This is a must-read for both governments and companies who need to fully understand this shift in power and the implications it has on how they interact with the networked individuals who represent their citizens, customers, suppliers."– Susanne Dirks, Leader, Global Centre for Economic Development(IBM Institute for Business Value)

(Susanne Dirks )

"Johnny Ryan has admirably captured the sweep of the Internet’s development from its earliest days, showing us how its profound impact is in part an accident of history, a phenomenon whose most interesting and liberating aspects could fade without reinforcement of its core values."– Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It

(Jonathan Zittrain )

"Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services, ubiquitous, low-cost bandwidth, and new devices like smartphones and the iPad, there are fewer obstacles to innovation than ever before. In the next decade, the ‘office’ need not be much more than an Internet connection. Johnny Ryan takes us through the history of the Internet to demonstrate how it has changed everything. But that’s not all; he also identifies what’s to come in the future.We are in a new era of transformation that has been powered by the Internet. Understanding the trends driving this revolution is pivotal to success. Consider this book your road map to getting there."–Marc Benioff, Chairman and ceo of salesforce.com

(Marc Benioff )

"Both an enormously useful work and a great read. Read it and understand what has made the Internet different."–TimWu, Columbia Law School

(Tim Wu )

"Amidst the RANDs and ARPANETs, the dates and somewhat dry details, and the numerous footnotes (the book is about as well-researched as any I’ve read), Ryan weaves in stories. These stories are what make this such a wonderful read. . . . Ryan’s stories and analogies serve several functions—first they make the book interesting and accessible. Second, the historical references put the Internet and all its technology into perspective and suggest that while inventions/technologies may change, people and the way people react to these technologies pretty much stay the same. . . . A History of the Internet and the Digital Future is a thoughtful book that is well researched and well written. The stories and historical references add color and life to the text and help show important cultural connections between today’s digital age and earlier times." (PopMatters.com )

“The WikiLeaks saga may have drawn us into new, and scary, galaxies of cyberspace, but this survey of the online story so far offers a handy catch-up that will prove a boon to geeks and dabblers alike.”

(Independent )

“An engrossing, well-written account of the Internet’s founding and the backstory of the underlying protocols and plumbing, which draws on that rich history to make predictions about the net’s future.”

(Cory Doctorow Boing Boing )

From the Author

The Internet, like many readers of this book, is a child of the industrial age. Long before the arrival of digital communications, the steam engine, telegraph pole and coalmine quickened the pace of the world. Industrialized commerce, communications and war spun the globe ever faster and increasingly to a centripetal beat. Control in the industrial- ized world was put at the centre. The furthest reaches of the globe came under the sway of centres of power: massive urbanization and a flight from the land created monstrous cities in the great nations; maritime empires brought vast swathes of the globe under the sway of imperial capitals. The training of workmen, the precise measurement of a pistol barrel's calibre, the mass assembly of automobiles, all were regimented, standardized in conformity with the centripetal imperative. The industrial revolution created a world of centralization and organized hierarchy. Its defining pattern was a single, central dot to which all strands led. But the emerging digital age is different.

A great adjustment in human affairs is under way. The pattern of political, commercial and cultural life is changing. The defining pattern of the emerging digital age is the absence of the central dot. In its place a mesh of many points is evolving, each linked by webs and networks. This story is about the death of the centre and the development of com- mercial and political life in a networked system. It is also the story about the coming power of the networked individual as the new vital unit of effective participation and creativity.

At the centre of this change is the Internet, a technology so unusual and so profoundly unlikely to have been created that its existence would be a constant marvel were it not a fact of daily life. No treatise or arch plan steered its development from beginning to end. Nor did its success come from serendipity alone, but from the peculiar ethic thatemerged among engineers and early computer lovers in the 1960s and '70s, and through the initiative of empowered users and networked communities. The combination of these elements has put power in the hands of the individual, power to challenge even the state, to compete for markets across the globe, to demand and create new types of media, to subvert a society - or to elect a president.

We have arrived at the point when the Internet has existed for a suf- ficiently long time for a historical study to reveal key characteristics that will have an impact on business, politics and society in the coming decades. Like all good histories, this book offers insight into the future by understanding the past. The first section of this book (Chapters 1-4) examines the concepts and context from which the Internet emerged. The second section (Chapters 5-9) traces how the technology and cul- ture of networking matured, freeing communities for the first time in human history from the tyranny of geography in the process. This section also describes the emergence of the Web and the folly of the dot- com boom and bust. The final section (Chapters 10-13) shows how the defining characteristics of the Internet are now transforming culture, commerce and politics.

Three characteristics have asserted themselves throughout the Internet's history, and will define the digital age to which we must all adjust: the Internet is a centrifugal force, user-driven and open. Under- standing what these characteristics mean and how they emerged is the key to making the great adjustment to the new global commons, a political and media system in flux and the future of competitive creativity. 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: Reaktion Books; 1 edition (September 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861897774
• ISBN-13: 978-1861897770
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #686,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Johnny Ryan (1980- ) grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and was educated at University College Dublin and at the University of Cambridge, where he was an O'Reilly foundation scholar at Magdalene College, and was supervised for his PhD by MI5's official historian.

He is the Chief Innovation Officer of The Irish Times, an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, and has written on digital issues in BusinessWeek, Fortune, Ars Technica, NATO Review, The Huffington Post and OpenDemocracy. He is on the speaker circuit, and has presented at the UN, NATO, and industry fora.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read November 10, 2010

By richardpike

Format:Hardcover

This is a really easy to read and excellent history book and like every good history book it shows how the past might shape the future. To like this book you dont have to be a techie just interested in how the internet came to be. I have tried to read a few books about the internet but found them either too technical or too up in the clouds, this has the right balance.
If you are in business and have to utilise the internet (dont we all) then this book is a great way to find out where it all came from and where it might be going.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Fascinating November 28, 2010

By Rebecca of Amazon HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

We live in such an exciting age and yet we seem to take the Internet for granted. We visit sites like YouTube, Google, MySpace, Wikipedia, WordPress, Netflix, iTunes, Twitter and Facebook on what seems like a daily basis. But what made these sites possible? This book presents the history of the Internet in great detail. Johnny Ryan did an incredible amount of research! He also answers the following questions:

Who sent the first email?
What was the first book sold on amazon.com?
What did Al Gore really say about the Internet?
When did spam officially appear online?

I personally found this book to be absolutely fascinating. Not only will you know a lot more about the history of computers you will understand exactly what it took to reach the stage at which we all became able to go online. There are also some tasty tidbits about amazon.

If I had to pick one book about the Internet, this would be it!

~The Rebecca Review

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How and why the Internet is "a centrifugal force, user-driven, and open" November 21, 2012

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I read this book when it was first published in 2010 and then re-read Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (first published in 1999) and strongly recommend that both be read in combination. The three defining characteristics in the title of this review are what Johnny Ryan has in mind when noting that Berners-Lee "came to realize the potential of a system that would allow a loose arrangement of ideas and data unconstrained by hierarchies or categories."

Berners-Lee had developed a piece of software called "Enquire" in the 1980s to map relationships between and among the various people, programs, and systems he encountered at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland and the world's largest particle physics laboratory. "Enquire marked the first step in his invention of the World Wide Web."

Ryan explains that there were three phases of the development of the Internet: its emergence (discussed in Chapters 1-4); the maturing of its technologies and culture of networking between and among communities (Chapters 5-9); and finally, he examines "how the defining characteristics of the Internet are now transforming, culture, commerce and politics (Chapters 10-13). Ryan also explains the three characteristics "that have asserted themselves throughout the Internet's history, and will define the digital age in which we must all adjust: the Internet is a centrifugal force, user-driven, and open."

These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me and they also give some indication of the range of subjects that Ryan discusses:

o Paul Baran and Project RAND (Pages 20-22)
o The Homebrew Club, Apple, IBM, and personal computers (56-61)
o The telephone network opens, the grassroots networks form...(66-69)
o Metcalfe's Law (85-86)
o Death of a Gopher (109-111)
o dot Tulip (122-126)
0 The peer-driven Internet (143-145)
o "Open-source" campaigns (166-177)
o Control in the Centrifugal World (182-187)
o iWar and the new pioneers(194-197)

Ryan has much of value to say about the quite different roles of dozens of "pioneers" who made significant contributions to the development of the Internet and then of the World Wide Web. They include the aforementioned Paul Baran (RAND) and Tim Berners-Lee (CERN) as well as Marc Andreesen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Vannevar Bush (chief science advisor to FDR), Vint Cerf, Friedrich Hayek, Leonard Kleinlock, J.C.R. Licklider (ARPA), Linus Torvalds (Linux), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

When concluding the final chapter, Promise and Peril, Ryan observes, "Humanity faces the risk of ruining the Internet even before it becomes a mature technology, before its benefit as a global commons can be fully realized. It must weigh the prospect of failure." I am curious to know what Ryan thinks now, about three years after composing that passage.

No brief commentary such as mine can possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of material that Johnny Ryan provides in this volume but I hope that I have at least suggested why I think so highly of him and his work. Also, I hope that those who read this commentary will be better prepared to determine whether or not they wish to read the book and, in that event, will have at least some idea of how the information, insights, and wisdom could perhaps be of substantial benefit to them and to their own organization.