I’d like to share my current reading list:
I’m halfway done with Patrice McDermott’s Who Needs To Know? – The State of Public Access to Federal Information (link). I wish I had started reading it sooner; it’s packed with public access substance–explanations of laws, the fights that led to their passage, their weaknesses, how they’re abused and how we should try to fix them.Â
I’m starting The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age (link), by Chris Casey. I understand that this book is dated in the best possible way–because it was written in the midst of a struggle to get Congress to take advantage of the emergent benefits of the Internet. Since Chris was personally involved in that fight, I’m looking forward to seeing how his work might shed light on what we’re trying to do now.
Third, I’m reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It (link). Zittrain paints the current state of Internet technology as a dynamic complex balance between two extremes. On one side is the open, generative net; technology’s wild-west radically egalitarian world where entry barriers are low, and collective action breeds success from unexpected quarters. On the other side is the authoritarian tendency to regulate, dictate, and control to the point of sterility. Failure on one side would be a fullscale descent into a flame war over porn by captcha evading spam bots, and failure on the other would be a privatized tyranny run by content providers or by authoritarian governments. Zittrain gives counsel on how to balance properly between generative social online freedom and the necessary administrative controls and regulations.
April Reading List
April 20th, 2008 by John Wonderlich · No Comments
Tags: openhouseproject
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