About me

I’m currently:

  • A Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)
  • Vice-President of Wolfson College, Cambridge
  • Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University
  • An Adjunct Professor at University College, Cork
  • My most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, which Quercus Books published in 2012. Random House is publishing a US edition.

    Other activities:

  • I am the Internet columnist of the London Observer. You can find an archive of my Networker columns here;
  • Fellow of Wolfson and Director of the College’s Press Fellowship Programme;
  • Along with Richard Evans and David Runciman, PI on a five-year Leverhulme-funded project on Conspiracy and Democracy which is based in the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences;
  • Academic Adviser to the Arcadia Project at Cambridge University Library a project that ran from 2008-2012 and had 19 Arcadia Fellows;
  • Author of a widely-read history of the Internet;
  • A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts mainly because I was a member of the group that drafted the Society’s Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property;
  • An investor in technology start-ups;
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Open Knowledge Foundation;
  • Member of the Strategic Advisory Board of Bloomsbury Academic Publishing;
  • Patron of the Cambridge Science Festival;
  • A keen (nay fanatical) photographer;
  • A grandfather (since November 2009);
  • A strange combination of taxi-driver and ATM machine (i.e. father of teenage children).
  • This Blog is named after Vannevar Bush’s original concept of a system for associative linking which eventually was realised as hypertext and later as the World Wide Web. The story in told in some detail in my book, A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet.

    Best email address for me: john.jnaughton [at] gmail.com