It was to be expected that a new millennium should bring with it a flurry of observers claiming that we stand on the threshold of a new society. We have not been disappointed. The media excitement at the fantastic financial speculation on the high-tech and internet stock market is but one instance cited to support this claim. This new society is labelled variously the information society, the knowledge society, the knowledge economy or, as this book chooses for no particular reason, the ‘information age’. The contributors to this book examine various features of today’s world, and find little evidence of a new information society.

Yet it is the information age, we are assured, because the key commodity for the twenty-first century is information. The technological developments of the last two or three decades mean that information can be moved around the world at speeds qualitatively (as well as quantitatively) different from the transport of goods. The consequences are economic and political: the information industries need no longer be located within a confined geography, and thus may seek out labour wherever it is most profitably available; governments may need to adopt different approaches to their relationship with business, while at the same time deploying new technologies to make this new information more widely and equitably available.

You may or may not have an inkling of what insecure software is, how it impacts your life, or why you should be concerned. That is OK. This book attempts to introduce you to the full scope and consequence of software's impact on modern society without baffling the reader with jargon only experts understand or minutia only experts care about. The prerequisite for this book is merely a hint of curiosity.

Although we interact with software on a daily basis, carry it on our mobile phones, drive with it in our cars, fly with it in our planes, and use it in our home and business computers, software itself remains essentially shrouded—a ghost in the machine; a mystery that functions but only part of the time. And therein lays our problem.

Software is the stuff of modern infrastructure. Not only is software infused into a growing number of commercial products we purchase and services we use, but government increasingly uses software to manage the details of our lives, to allocate benefits and public services we enjoy as citizens, and to administer and defend the state as a whole. How and when we touch software and how and when it touches us is less our choice every day. The quality of this software matters greatly; the level of protection this software affords us from harm and exploitation matters even more.

As a case in point, in mid-2007 the country of Estonia, dubbed "the most wired nation in Europe" because of its pervasive use of computer networks for a wide array of private and public activities, had a significant portion of its national infrastructure crippled for over two weeks by cyber attacks launched from hundreds of thousands of individual computers that had been previously hijacked by Russian hackers. Estonia was so overwhelmed by the attacks Estonian leaders literally severed the country's connection to the Internet and with it the country's economic and communications lifeline to the rest of the world. As one Estonian official lamented, "We are back to the stone age." The reason for the cyber attack? The Russian government objected to Estonia's removal of a Soviet-era war memorial from the center of its capital Tallinn to a military cemetery.

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

 

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk.

 

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find--that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life.

The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Kl?Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation.

About the Author

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

Nick Montfort is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at MIT.

Essential Skills--Made Easy!

Learn to program with Flex 3, the powerful tool for building multimedia-rich, interactive Flash applications for the Web. Flex 3: A Beginner's Guide is an easy-to-follow, fast-paced tutorial that allows you to fully grasp the fundamentals, including MXML, ActionScript, Flex Builder, states, transitions, and behaviors. You'll learn how to customize your applications with styles, skins, and themes; access remote data using the XML HTTP Service Request; profile and debug your applications; and manage media assets.

Designed for Easy Learning

• Key Skills & Concepts--Chapter-opening lists of specific skills covered in the chapter
• Ask the Experts--Q&A sections filled with bonus information and helpful tips
• Try This--Short, hands-on exercises to practice your skills
• Notes--Bonus information related to the topic being covered
• Tips--Helpful reminders or alternate ways of doing things
• Cautions--Errors and pitfalls to avoid
• Annotated Syntax--Example code with commentary that describes the programming techniques being illustrated

About the Author

Michele E. Davis is a technology writer and author or coauthor of more than 17 computer books. She consults as an instructional designer, trainer, and technical writer for Fortune 500 companies including General Mills, ACS, Whirlpool, Best Buy and many others.

Jon A. Phillips designs custom Web solutions and consults as a functional software developer for clients such as the University of Minnesota, Fisher-Rosemount, Lockheed-Martin, and Kinetic Data. He has worked with numerous databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL for more than 14 years. Phillips has coauthored five technology books with Michele Davis.