I’m currently Vice-President of Wolfson College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University.
I recently spent a sabbatical year working on a book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet
, which Quercus has recently published.
In addition, I’m also:
A columnist on the London Observer. You can find an archive of my Networker columns here;
A Fellow of Wolfson and Director of the College’s Press Fellowship Programme;
Academic Adviser to the Arcadia Project at Cambridge University Library;
Author of a widely-read history of the Internet;
A non-exec director of Cambridge Visual Networks (aka Camvine), a company I co-founded with my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser;
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. I was a member of the group that drafted the Society’s Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property;
A member of the Advisory Board of the Open Knowledge Foundation;
A member of the Strategic Advisory Board of Bloomsbury Academic Publishing;
A 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
