Richard Barbrook's new book

Hi all,

I've just seen this Guardian article about Richard Barbrook's new book in today's paper. It looks a good read. He co-authored an interesting essay a few years ago about the Internet as Californian ideology: the central argument was essentially that the Internet reflects the particular historical mix of the social liberalism and free market Reaganomics dominant in post 1960s California, which was the particular environment of much of the early development.

While I'm not sure about the specific link between techno-utopianism and the cold war - though I'm looking forward to reading the book - the general points about technological determinism and the current claims about Web 2.0 hype in particular strike a chord with me. A couple of days ago, I referred a research student to a 1994 paper critiquing the idea that computer mediated communication (essentially, then usenet and email) was inherently democratic; an idea which was pretty prevalent in the late 1980s and early 1990s too. Plus ca change. This led me to wonder about how we might distinguish between openness to innovation and gullibility(:-).

Steve