Shift!: The Unfolding Internet - Hype, Hope and History

"Frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken." Thomas KuhnDiscovery is a scientific process that must unfold in time. Oxygen was first described as 'air itself entire', and Uranus was assumed to be a comet because all the planets were known and named. It takes time for us to realise that something has arrived that did not previously exist, and to stop imposing old terminology and expectations upon it. Using a host of vivid historical examples, Edward Burman uses the 'paradigm shift' thinking explored by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (over a million copies sold) to assess the Internet as a scientific breakthrough like any other. Dismissing its attempted hijack by 'dot com' business as cynical and doomed to failure, he unravels the past and predicts a time close ahead when barriers will fall, perceptions will change, and the Internet will penetrate our way of life with a power greater than electricity, the car or the telephone.If you thought the Internet was someone else's business, think again.