I mentioned POINT of VIEW to close the last post, chiding Isaacson's Innovators for omitting any of the network contributors to the Digital Revolution, whilst including the topic of networking on one out of every five pages in the book.
Another example comes from one of my favorite History of Technology writers, Jim Cortada, whom I mentioned in the post last December about Dearborn's SIG/CIS meeting.
Jim's most recent 'big' book is The Digital Flood: the diffusion of Information Technology across the USA, Europe and Asia. One would expect that the WWW, and the Internet, were a big part of that diffusion, right? And Jim is writing about ICT--Information and Communication Technology--as the rest of the world titles it. It is a terrific book, taking a big swath of territory, including the politics of cities, states, and nations as they encounter and embrace ICT issues.
There is simply no book like it, and I heartily endorse it.
Except...well, lessee. There's that pesky Point of View issue.
Page counts for IT providers by name include IBM on 139 of 599 pages, Apple on 23, HP on 11
Page counts for WWW by name is 86 pages, so networks must have mattered. But page counts for all networking companies of all stripes that I could find = 1. Cisco is mentioned once, period. No other company is mentioned, nor is any networking technology mentioned except Token Ring (from IBM) once. No TCP/IP, no EtherNet, no X.25, no ATM, no anything. Mostly WWW and IBM made all this happen.
You might recall that Jim was a 30+ year IBM executive, as well as a professional historian.
Point of View biases each of us, and it is easier to see in others than in ourselves.
But it is there, in everything we read, view, and embrace.
Friday, August 21, 2015
History is so much bunk
So saith Henry Ford, multiple times. Reports from 1916 onward, when he began his diatribes against knowing or worrying about or learning from history, indicate that he was quite the character. Donald Trump would find him a great fellow-traveler on his current quest to be certified.
Is history 'so much bunk?' Well, it certainly has some interesting sidebars if you study it just a bit. I'm intrigued these days as much by what doesn't get said, as what does. Take, for example, Walt Isaacson's two most recent books--the wildly popular best-seller Steve Jobs, and the much more nuanced Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
The Jobs book was commissioned, almost as Jobs was dying, rushed to market to capitalize on Apple's strong brand and Jobs' near mythical status as its innovator/leader. It was not well researched, it lacked important elements of 'the story,' but it 'caught the mood' and sold A LOT.
Fortunately, along comes Becoming Steve Jobs, so we have a better, more nuanced account.
Isaacson's Innovators, on the other hand, is a gem of his own desire, with years spent on it. It shows. Isaacson is a gifted writer, no question about it, and he creates readable, page-turning prose. And it is a great contribution, even though a few historians of science quibbled about some factoids.
What I found interesting, though, is the premise that "the Digital Revolution" is mostly about small computers and mobile phones, never mind the infrastructure that runs them. So I did a check on words. Internet, or WWW, appears on 98 of the 490 text pages--he must think the Internet is part of the Digital Revolution. And the title is about the "hackers, geniuses, and geeks" who did it. So who is listed, from the network side? Bob Metcalfe, once. His Ethernet idea, once. Cisco as a name, once. And no one else, and no other company, of the eighteen prominent and perhaps fifty also-rans who built the backbone for all of our mobile and connected world.
So, it is not an indictment so much as an observation about POINT OF VIEW. Point of view of the author is always the give-away.
And my guess is that Henry Ford understood at least a bit of that perspective when he blurted out his famous words 'for history.'
Is history 'so much bunk?' Well, it certainly has some interesting sidebars if you study it just a bit. I'm intrigued these days as much by what doesn't get said, as what does. Take, for example, Walt Isaacson's two most recent books--the wildly popular best-seller Steve Jobs, and the much more nuanced Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
The Jobs book was commissioned, almost as Jobs was dying, rushed to market to capitalize on Apple's strong brand and Jobs' near mythical status as its innovator/leader. It was not well researched, it lacked important elements of 'the story,' but it 'caught the mood' and sold A LOT.
Fortunately, along comes Becoming Steve Jobs, so we have a better, more nuanced account.
Isaacson's Innovators, on the other hand, is a gem of his own desire, with years spent on it. It shows. Isaacson is a gifted writer, no question about it, and he creates readable, page-turning prose. And it is a great contribution, even though a few historians of science quibbled about some factoids.
What I found interesting, though, is the premise that "the Digital Revolution" is mostly about small computers and mobile phones, never mind the infrastructure that runs them. So I did a check on words. Internet, or WWW, appears on 98 of the 490 text pages--he must think the Internet is part of the Digital Revolution. And the title is about the "hackers, geniuses, and geeks" who did it. So who is listed, from the network side? Bob Metcalfe, once. His Ethernet idea, once. Cisco as a name, once. And no one else, and no other company, of the eighteen prominent and perhaps fifty also-rans who built the backbone for all of our mobile and connected world.
So, it is not an indictment so much as an observation about POINT OF VIEW. Point of view of the author is always the give-away.
And my guess is that Henry Ford understood at least a bit of that perspective when he blurted out his famous words 'for history.'
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