Networked Press Freedom

Reimagining press freedom in a networked era: not just a journalist's right to speak but also a public's right to hear.

Reimagining press freedom in a networked era: not just a journalist's right to speak but also a public's right to hear.

This technological tour de force is simply breathtaking in its polemical power and predictive capabilities. Reading this book more than 20 years after it was published, one comes to believe that Pool must have possessed a crystal ball or had a Nostradamus-like ability to foresee the future. For example, long before anyone else had envisioned what we now refer to as "cyberspace," Pool was describing it in this book. "Networked computers will be the printing presses of the twenty-first century," he argued in his remarkably prescient chapter on electronic publishing. "Soon most published information will disseminated electronically." Few probably believed him in 1983, but no one doubts him now. Meanwhile, he did all this while also providing a passionate defense of technological freedom and freedom of speech in the electronic age. If you care about those things, read this book. It is a masterpiece.

Victorian Sensations transports us to the last years of Queen Victoria's reign to explore a moment of thrilling discovery and change that continues to resonate today.