Future students of the internet will have a fine clutch of tomes to study
Pretty soon, the worldwide web will be history. I don't mean it will go the way of the Routemaster. Rather, the birth and early development of the worldwide web will become objects of study - seized from the grip of the commenterati and redistributed to the undergraduate population that today's tottering toddlers will soon become.
Assuming there will be books in the universities of 15 years' time (or, indeed, universities), what will be on the reading list? The answer naturally lies in how the web develops over the next decade - the lens of history is a distorted one. But if the web continues to be the kind of open, accessible platform that led to Time magazine voting all web users its "Person of the Year" for 2006, then I can think of a few popular period texts that will be traded among students in decades to come.
The first is A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist. Crafted for the 1996 Davos summit, it begins: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." Although Barlow's attempt to characterise the web as innately ungovernable has since been challenged by censorious nations such as China, it remains an important record of the optimism of early web thinkers.
The first popular work to predict the effect the web would have on markets was the 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto, which depicted markets on the web as conversations, and warned that companies without a human voice would be doomed to failure online. Last year, the Wired editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, added The Long Tail to this blossoming canon; it looks at data from online retailers and exposes a previously unseen second market, as big as the first, in niche services and products.
The development of new modes of production - evident in free software, Wikipedia and MySpace - will be understood by future students through texts such as Eric S Raymond's 1997 paper (and then book) The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a study of the motivations of early free software coders and a history of the movement, as well as Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world.
Those wishing to read further will turn to two takes on the web's political economy - The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, written by Pekka Himanen in 2001, and The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler's vigorous 2006 study of peer production on the web. However, if by that time historical study has indeed turned from the industrial to the information revolution, these puns may well be lost on the future-generation students who come to them.
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