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This note provides a selection of books for understanding
the net and life in the digital environment.
It covers -
introduction
We are recurrently asked for reading lists about 'the
internet' or 'life online' or 'new media and the new economy'.
This note offers an eclectic and irreverent response to
such requests.
It is also a contribution, albeit at times tongue-in-cheek,
to the journalistic 'top 100' or '50 best' genre of list
making and reputation shaping.
The following page provides a brief annotated list of
works that are of value for understanding the net as a
technical artifact and as a sphere of human activity,
including commercial exploitation, means of cultural expression
and subject of regulation.
The list supplements discussion in several of the guides
elsewhere on this site and can be used as a point of entry
into those pages.
It does not purport to identify the hundred most popular
books, hundred most authoritative or even the hundred
most influential works.
Instead it provides comments on books that are of particular
value for
- identifying
themes in debates about the net and the broader digital
environment
- making
sense of claims that feature in those debates.
Some
works are narrowly polemical. Others articulate philosophies
or business models that strike us as wrong-headed.
They are of use, however, in understanding conversations
– often shouted conversations – in Australia
and elsewhere regarding such matters as intellectual property
rights and responsibilities, 'electronic democracy', censorship,
privacy and commerce in a 'borderless world'.
tops of the pops
The notion of the 'hundred best' – in practice the
hundred best-sellers or most-broadcast – is a surprisingly
modern invention, one that is attributable to both cultural
insecurities (validation of consumption by appearance
in a list of what 'the public' is buying or hearing) and
to the emergence of mechanisms for quickly identifying
what is being sold, watched or heard.
Those mechanisms form part of the mathematisation of the
world evident in thinking about statistics, risk and measurement
during the past two centuries.
They have included audience
measurement systems, initially in print (notably newspaper
circulation bureaux), cinema box office receipts (the
'weekly gross') and subsequently in electronic media (radio
broadcast logs, television viewer diaries and devices
that track what was on the box although not whether the
viewer was absorbing the ads or even in the same room).
In practice they have often been predictive.
Disappointing opening receipts during the golden age of
cinema – an epoch when, contrary to recent myths,
consumers were just as fickle as today – could lead
to early withdrawal of a film from circulation or even
a radical editing to make a particular work more crowd-pleasing.
Bomb on the first night and you might simply disappear,
only to be rescued by cineastes after 40 years of invisibility.
Cult television is littered with series yanked mid-season
after colliding with the tyranny of 'the rating system'
– the resurrection of Star Trek is exceptional.
Disappointing sales of a novel or non-fiction work might
similar spell finis for a writer's career, with some of
the literary greats being dismissed as the publishing
equivalent of 'box office' poison – in contrast
to best-sellers such as Ethel M Dell, Elinor Glyn, Herman
Wouk or Bryce Courtenay – and thence denied substantial
advances or even offers of publication of further works.
Failure to climb the New York Times best-seller
list might result
in non-appearance in future. Given the significance of
such lists as a signal for individual consumers and for
retailers it is unsurprising that publishers, authors
and agents have gone to considerable pains to subvert
the system in an effort to boost ranking of particular
works.
Angst about votes by consumers in a mass culture has been
reflected in canon-making, notably projects such as Chicago's
Great Books program – designed to civilise the booboosie
or merely the crew cut & flannel suit boys studying
engineering and accounting. Despite nostalgia for suburban
reading groups and Eisenhower-era civic betterment it
is difficult to escape the impression that most of the
'hundred undying classics' did not escape from their status
as signifiers of aspiration and soundness: parked, unread
and even unopened, on the shelf - undead rather than undying.
themes
What would you provide to a martian or other extraterrestrial
seeking to identify what people are disagreeing about
(and why) and what are the spoken or unspoken points of
agreement regarding the global information infrastructure
and its use?
Eighty years ago, amid the vogue for collections under
the banner of 'The Home University' or less starchy 'Teach
Yourself books' (essential information about Esperanto,
suffrage in Bohemia and kite flying), authors boldly offered
grand simplifications such as The Intelligent Woman's
Guide To Socialism. (Unintelligent women, ie any
too indifferent to buy/read the tract, it seems needed
not apply to join the vegetarian boys club.)
What the following page offers is something broader. We've
arranged a selection of works under six basic themes –
-
infrastructure – where did the net come from and
how does it operate?
- populations
- who is online and what do they do?
-
regulation – how is the net regulated and what
are some tensions in that regulation?
-
dollars and sense – the nature of the 'new economy'
and the 'dot com experience'
- old
wine in new bottles? – media, intellectual property
and the digital consumer
-
identity and evaluation – finding and making sense
of what is online.
Works
have been chosen on the basis of their insights, eloquence
or merely because they articulate arguments that many
people have found persuasive. Readers of other pages on
this site will notice that we have on occasion found some
arguments quite unpersuasive or suggested that reality
is more complex than might be inferred from polemic about
the 'spirit of the net' and its day to day consequences.
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