"...remarkable...poetic...(a) renaissance sweep of imagination...SPIRIT OF THE WEB is an engaging hybrid of popular scholarship: part archive, part science textbook, part philosophy, part polemic about the nature of authority and the control of information in all ages...Like life, digital networks are an emergent system; Rowland helps put their past and future in perspective."
The Globe and Mail "Review of Books"
"...thoroughly and trenchantly chronicles the vagaries of information technology ...a spirited, stimulating and sophisticated network of stories...philosophical and original."
Winnipeg Free Press
From the publisher's catalogue:
"The urge to communicate over distance and
time is one of the most basic of human impulses. It has led us from the
megaphone to the drum, to smoke signals, to the telegraph and penny post,
to telephony, radio and television and finally to today's digital
multimedia.
"This popular history of evolution of the ways we communication gives us
fascinating and important perspective in understanding the roots of the
modern electronic revolution. It shows how the wiring of our planet for
the last one hundred and fifty years has led to the Global Village we now
inhabit.
"This is a vast and absorbing story about the human imagination and its
resourcefulness. It is a dramatic story that includes personalities and
inventions; the social, economic and political consequences of those
technologies, as well as a philosophical subtext about communications
theory and how it has changed our world.
"Spirit of the Web is an optimistic work that points to the extraordinary
promise of the Internet as a truly democratic means of communication."
Spirit of the Web - Table of Contents
Introduction: Extensions of Man
Spirt of the Web - Part I: The Analogue Era
Chapter 1: The Meaning of the Age of Information
Chapter 2: The Need to Communicate
Chapter 3: Prelude to the Telegraph
Chapter 4: The "Invention" of the Electron
Chapter 5: The Electric Telegraph
Chapter 6: A World Wide Web
Chapter 7: The Invention of the Modern Inventor
Chapter 8: The Telephone
Chapter 9: A Convivial Technology
Chapter 10: The Invention of Radio
Chapter 11: Radio Goes International
Chapter 12: How Radio Works: Hertzian Waves, Fleming's Valve and De Forest's Audion
Chapter 13: The State Muscles In
Chapter 14: How the First Mass Medium was Born
Chapter 15: Broadcasting's Pot of Gold
Chapter 16: Television
Chapter 17: The Politics of Broadcasting
Spirit of the Web - Part II: The Digital Era
Chapter 18: "Reasoning is but Reckoning":The philosophic underpinnings of the electronic computer
Chapter 19: The Amazingly Precocious Charles Babbage
Chapter 20: The Secrets of Formal Systems and the Enigmatic Alan Turing
Chapter 21: The Computer Comes of Age
Chapter 22: Information, Chaos and Reality
Chapter 23: The Prodigal Semiconductor
Chapter 24: Robert Noyce and the Integrated Circuit
Chapter 25: The Personal Computer
Chapter 26: A Digital Mardi Gras
Chapter 27: Hypertext, Search Engines and Browsers: How the Net Became a Mass Medium
Chapter 28: Anarchy, Business and Public Space: The Net Grows Up
Chapter 29: Can the Net Think?
Chapter 30: The New Economy
Chapter 31: The Promise of the Age of Information
Notes
Index
Read an excerpt from "Spirit of the Web"
Praise for "Spirit of the Web"
"...remarkable...poetic...(a) renaissance sweep of imagination...SPIRIT OF THE WEB is an engaging hybrid of popular scholarship: part archive, part science textbook, part philosophy, part polemic about the nature of authority and the control of information in all ages...Like life, digital networks are an emergent system; Rowland helps put their past and future in perspective."
Wade Rowland is one of Canada's most respected literary journalists. He has worked for the Winnipeg Free Press, the Toronto Telegram and both national Canadian television networks: CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and the CTV Television Network. Rowland writes and lectures extensively on the new media, ethical issues, and science and technology.
