If your interest in the Internet goes beyond where to find the best pics of Winona Ryder’s face grafted onto someone else’s nude body, this is where to get started. You can find all of these books either on-line, or available for purchase on-line. Hm… let’s see if I can scare you into reading them… if you call yourself an Internet expert and you haven’t read these books, someone is going to call you on it sooner or later.
- What Your Children are Doing on the Information Highway
- There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
- In Association with Amazon.Com
- Negative Space is now an Amazon Associate (much like the rest of the on-line world) which means that if you see something totally off the wall here and you actually want to read it, a purchase is just a click away. Oh oh oh just a click away…
More Information
- The Cartoon Guide to the Computer•
- The author of “The Cartoon History of the Universe” has done it again with the computer.There’s too much emphasis on computer programming (he includes a page on each of the major BASIC language commands) but most of the information is either about the history of computers or the heart of what makes computers tick. You don’t need this book to switch your computer on. But if you’d like a better understanding of why some things always happen, such as why the numbers 256, 512, and 1024 keep popping up, you’ll not find a more entertaining way to learn.
- The Futurological Congress•
- Stanislaw Lem is a brilliant author, and “The Futurological Congress” is perhaps his most prophetic work. Drugs for pacification, drugs for better living, drugs to counteract drugs! This is a brilliant book about what happens when we gain full control over what we see, but no control over what actually is. I strongly recommended it.
- The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and Society•
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There are works that come along once in an age and influence generations. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics is one of these works. Listen: “The dissemination of any scientific secret whatever is merely a matter of time. In this game a decade is a long time, and in the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies.” Wiener shows a prophetic understanding of the nature of information, communication, and automated control of our environment. If you want a book that tells you about the future of the Internet, buy the one what was written in 1950.
- PowerShift•
- The author of Future Shock is still going strong decades later. PowerShift is a pre-Internet description of what a fully-connected society is going to look like. The thesis is that (a) there are three sources of power: knowledge, wealth, and violence; and (b) knowledge is rapidly becoming the most important source of power in the modern world. To the point where wars will not only be fought over information, they will be fought with information.
- This Tree Grows Out of Hell•
- After I bought this book it took me a while to get started on it. To be honest, it was the author’s name that put me off. Ptolemy Tompkins? Do a search on him in Amazon and you’re in new age heaven. But this book isn’t about mesoamerican archaeology as it claims on the jacket. Tompkins weaves a history of the Mayans and Aztecs in order to make a point about us. The Mayans (so he tells) built more and more space between their gods and themselve leaving all responsibility upon the priests of the religion until there was no more need to return to the temple-cities.
- Understanding Comics•
- Everyone who is interested in comics as an artform or as a medium of information exchange should read this book. You’ll have fun just leafing through it reading the various chapters.
- Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man•
- Everything that we create, according to McLuhan, becomes an extension of our body. Our clothing, our cars, our televisions, are all inventions to exceed our grasp or expand our abilities, he says, and he tries to come up with a theory for predicting how our inventions affect our psychology. Whether he ultimately succeeds or fails is a hot topic even today. I find I have less use for Understanding Media the more the future rolls in. This is, however, an Important Work in modern electronic communications.
Related Pages
- San Diego After Midnight
- Walkerville Reader
- Cerebus the Gopher
- FireBlade Coffeehouse
- Highland Games
- Mimsy
- Neon Alley
- Tutorials
- Your Children
- AppleScript Basics
- Breaking In to Mac OS X
- Carnival of HTML
- CSS
- Easy Web Design
- Education
- History of the Internet
- HTTP headers
- JavaScript for Beginners
- MySQL for Other Applications
- Negative Space Spaced Out
- Perls Before Swine
- Persistence of Text
- PHP: Hot Pages
- PowerShift
- PyTown
- Recommended Reading
- Simple Photorealism
- Software Select
- Evaluating Information
- Gender Neutral Instructions
- Strange Bedfellows
- Jerry Stratton
- Search Negative Space
- Elder Pages
