Setting the kook bit + a call for internet books and articles

[pmb]

I'm reading and gathering references for my thesis - in this stage, I have to demonstrate that I ahve sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge to write a satisfactory thesis wherein I analyze all the quantitative data on the internet's history that I can find and then find out what affects the stability and growth of the net and what doesn't. This means that I need to read hardcore networking papers, graph theory papers, social network analysis papers, internet analysis papers, and internet-and-politics-and-society papers.

It's this last category that's giving me trouble. I think I might be too quick to write off a book as written by a kook - essentially, if it's not from Oxford University Press or MIT Press or similar OR written by an acknowleged skilled science writer or internet founder, then it's probably not even wrong. Or so my title-based classification seems to be saying. But maybe I'm too quick to judge. After all, despite its strident tone, Doc Searl's article is right on the money in a lot of ways, so perhaps I'm throwing out too much wheat with all the chaff that I'm culling. I feel like I'm becoming some kind of anti-humanities bigot and turning my back on my HMC education, but when I encounter books that use "cyber" as a verb[1], I just shut off all further input and endeavor to scrub all vestiges of that book out of my memory.

Does anyone have any non-sucky "history of the internet" references, particularly ones with interesting analyses of the social/economic/political implications of omnipresent networking flowing relatively freely? Right now I'm looking at some pretty slim pickings, and I'd like some meatier stuff...

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[1] - "cyber" as in "cybering democracy" not slang for "cybersex" which is probably now outre and not the hip slang anymore.

Comments

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Thank you for including an example of how to use "cyber" as a verb. I would have puzzled at that 'til my puzzler was sore. Cybering democracy? That's just silly. You have my sympathies.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Cybering Democracy

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

No...kind of you, but I have enough trouble with plain democracy-- I think I will pass on it being "cybered"

??

[ouro.livejournal.com]

"cybering" in that context is like "leveraging"

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I suspect The Internet is still too busy being the future to be well-covered as history.

That's what they say, but they are wrong.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, that's what the first paragraph of the first chapter of Academe and the Internet claimed was the prevailing wisdom, but I'm pretty sure that we're losing the history of computer science and the internet at a prodigious rate. For example: nobody ever got a really awesome interview with Jon Postel?!? That's some tragic news right there.

[cabanasloth.livejournal.com]

Manuel Castells wrote a three-volume series on "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture". The first volume was published in 1996 and was titled "The Rise of the Network Society." It has a chapter on the internet and internet-like things - keep in mind it was 96, so he was pretty fast off the line in this. He is a sociology professor at Berkeley, and therefore probably but not definitively not a kook.

It's been more than five years since I read it, but I remember it as enjoyable.

[springbok1.livejournal.com]

rgeorge's boss was one of the main programmers for Gopher. From what Rogers has told me, his boss has never quite gotten over the bitterness of the demise (more or less) of Gopher in favor of internet as we know and use it today. Nonetheless, if it would be useful at all to your thesis, I'd be happy to put you in touch with him.