As long as I’m praising fine writers and thinkers whom I love to read, have I mentioned John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog lately?
I first encountered John Naughton when I found his extraordinary history of the early days of the Internet and the Web, A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia (many thanks to my friend Kate Propert who took me there). Naughton’s a cracker-jack writer who had me at hello and kept me long after goodbye, as this blog post testifies. Here’s a sample of that book, a print artifact that was a portal not just to fresh revelations but also, and more importantly, a new revealer:
[I]t’s impossible to read the history of the Net without being struck by the extent to which the genius of particular individuals played a crucial role in the development of the concept and its realisation in hardware and software. It’s easy to look back now and laugh at Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis,” or to describe Donald Davies’ idea of packet-switching, Wesley Clark’s notion of a subnetwork of message-processors, or Vint Cerf’s concept of a gateway between incompatible networks as “simple” or “obvious.” But that, in a way, is a measure of their originality. They are those “effective surprises” of which Jerome Bruner writes–the insights which have “the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment.” The fact that we live now in a packet switched and networked world should not blind us to the ingenuity of the original ideas. And the people who conceived the should not be subject to what the historian E. P. Thompson called “the condescension of posterity.”
This is not a fashionable view in some quarters, especially those lodged on the higher slopes of the history and sociology of technology. From that lofty vantage point, scientists, inventors and engineers look rather as rats do to a behaviourist–creatures running in a maze created by economic and social forces which they do not understand, and achieving success only when they press the levers which the prevailing order has ordained will yield success. It’s rather like the view famously expressed by Bertrand Russell that economics was about how people make choices and sociology about how they don’t have any choices to make.
Add to this the fact that Naughton’s follow-up, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, is every bit as compelling, personal, learned, and far-sighted; and the fact that this man was a friend of George Steiner; and that because as Tom Woodward reminds us “people still blog,” you can read his lucid prose on his blog every day, and that he used to teach with Martin Weller (I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall for that) … well, there’s much more to be said, but rather than say it, I’ll simply invite you to follow @jjn1, read his blog to learn from his associative trails, and find in every case what Chaucer called sentence and solas, meaning and comfort, instruction and delight. Those were the criteria by which the innkeeper would judge the best stories told by the Canterbury pilgrims. In his way, Naughton is also a pilgrim: one who views his own life as a journey with boon companions toward a fiercely imagined destination, one that may turn out to be real if we have the courage to invent it together.
I hope I will meet him someday.
