"Impressively informed and informative, accessibly organized and presented, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future is an extraordinary history of communication technologies and their social/political impact. Steve Case, American entrepreneur, founder AOL "A fascinating review of 500 years of new technology and the challenges as well as opportunities of technological change." Tom Standage, author, The Victorian Internet With his entertaining account of three historical network revolutions, and the reactions they inspired, Tom Wheeler gives us the tools to understand the one we are living through today-and where it might take us tomorrow." "Sometimes we have to take a step back in order to understand what's under our noses. He seems to sense in his bones the age-old (and comforting) truth that "there's nothing new under the sun," and yet is able to weave together complex and fascinating stories about the machines we make-and the way they make us." "With each new book, Tom Wheeler cements his stature as one of the foremost "explainers" of technology and its effects throughout our history. We support the most popular ebooks formats. You can add books from your computer, or from Google Drive. It supports 2 common eBook formats, including Epub and Mobi. Book Detailsīrookings Institution Press, February 26, 2019 You can read your ebooks easily with our ebook reader online app. Outlining “What’s Next,” he describes how artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain, and the need for cybersecurity are laying the foundation for a third network revolution. Wheeler puts these past revolutions into the perspective of today, when rapid-fire changes in networking are upending the nature of work, personal privacy, education, the media, and nearly every other aspect of modern life. Along with the development of the world’s first high-speed network-the railroad-the telegraph upended centuries of stability and literally redrew the map of the world. Never before had people been able to communicate over long distances faster than a horse could travel. The second revolution came with the invention of the telegraph early in the nineteenth century. This book, its millions of predecessors, and even such broad trends as the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the multiple scientific revolutions of the past 500 years would not have been possible without that one invention. The first big network revolution was the invention of movable-type printing in the fifteenth century. In this fascinating book, former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler brings to life the two great network revolutions of the past and uses them to help put in perspective the confusion, uncertainty, and even excitement most people face today. But our ancestors at times were just as bewildered by rapid upheavals in what we now call “networks”-the physical links that bind any society together. Today’s changes may be new and may be happening faster than ever before. In an era of seemingly instant change, it’s easy to think that today’s revolutions-in communications, business, and many areas of daily life-are unprecedented. Whether we like it or not, we now live in a Google-centric world.Network revolutions of the past have shaped the present and set the stage for the revolution we are experiencing today In 2005, the newly-minted term Google bomb became popular, to describe the intentional skewing of Google search results by creating links to misleading web pages. A whole new industry has sprung up around Google, including the new field of search-engine optimization or SEO, which works to boost the ranking of a name or term in Google and other search-engine results. When users google themselves, unless their names are absurdly rare, they may find their “googlegangers” (a portmanteau word combining “google” and “doppelgänger”), or their namesakes, listed in the Google search results. People were “googling” all sorts of information, including their own names. Soon after Google was created, the trademarked company name became a popular verb. Googol was coined in the 1930s and is attributed to the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. The term google itself is a creative spelling of googol, a number equal to 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially, an unfathomable number. Founded in 1998, the website has become such an institution that in its short existence, it has changed not only the way we process the endless data found online, but also the way we think and talk about the internet.