I am:

• A Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) where I have in the past co-directed the Conspiracy and Democracy and Technology and Democracy projects. The Conspiracy project finished in November 2018.

• In 2020 I co-founded (with Professor Steven Connor) the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy in CRASSH with generous five-year funding from the Minderoo Foundation. I am the Chair of the Centre’s Advisory Committee.

In addition, I am:

• Director of the Press Fellowship Programme at Wolfson College, Cambridge

• Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University

• The Technology columnist of the London Observer newspaper.

My most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, is published by Quercus Books. Current projects include:

• 95 Theses about Technology, which is currently a website and will eventually become a book — among other things.
• 100 Not Out: A lockdown Diary, now available as a Kindle book
• A Reader’s Guide to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — in the works now.

Academic work:

• Along with Sir Richard Evans and David Runciman, I was a 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 (CRASSH);
• I have occasionally taught on the Masters in Public Administration course in the Department of Politics and International Studies
• I supervise students on the MSt (Masters In International Relations) course in the department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge

Other activities:

• Internet columnist of the London Observer. You can find an archive of my Networker columns here and some of my essays and longer pieces here;
• Former Vice President and now Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College where I run the College’s Press Fellowship Programme;
• I was 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;
• One of the authors of the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts;
• An investor in technology start-ups;
• A keen (nay fanatical) photographer;
• A grandfather (since November 2009);
• A daily blogger. My Blog — Memex 1.1 — 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. The blog is also available as a daily newsletter.

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

Hi-res mugshot of me is available here on a CC-by licence (which means you must credit the photographer, Sebastiaan Ter Burg).