Just one statistic on the Internet: it took radio 37 years to attract 50 million users, it took television 15 years, but the Internet did it in three years. So what is the Internet? Where did it come from? How does it work? Can it live up to the hype? John Naughton, a long-time Net enthusiast, academic and journalist, answers these questions and more in an idiosyncratic, delightfully chatty, exceptionally readable tour of the technology he calls "a terrible beauty" and its eccentric inventors. For Naughton, the wonder of the Internet is similar to that of ham radio as he was growing up in 1950s rural Ireland - the immediacy of communication. But, he warns, "the most gloriously open, uncensored and unregulated public space in human history" is now under threat, as governments and e-commerce attempt to legislate, regulate and encrypt. A must for anyone who wants to understand the communications revolution.
- Sarah Marriott
The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Fashion Writing, edited by Judith Watt