NETWORKS and webs are much more than the communications medium of our day: they are becoming the dominant metaphor to describe subjects as diverse as neurology and philosophy. How inevitable then that someone should write the history of a network of people who helped turn the internet from a computer science project into a mass medium.
Books, however, are not a network-friendly format. One page follows another in determinedly linear and one-dimensional progression. The way out for Fred Turner, assistant professor in communications at Stanford University and author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, was to focus on a central…
