About me

I am:

In addition, I am:

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:

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).