Point of View

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.