Adam Thierer in Technology Liberation Front has a nice overview of the recent raft of books on the internet. Thierer presents a schema grouping optimists and pessimists, and books by their beliefs/themes.

Those of us early and ardent adopters of the internet and web already have a fairly sanguine and historically constituted view of the benefits and deficits of its use, and realize that technology has been both advantageous and problematic since the Acheulian handaxe came on the scene (get your very own here: but doesn't that violate some international laws?)

Perhaps more interesting are the parallels between debates about the internet's value and early modern discourse regarding mapmaking (a line of thought I owe my colleague Tom Lolis). In his dissertation, "The Cartography of Interiority: Magic, Mapmaking, and the Search for Eden in the Renaissance," Lolis writes that "the early modern map is as much a diagram of anxieties related to the limitations of human experience as it is a representation of the continents, oceans, or stars."

The metacognitive shifts embodied in the internet and web 2.0 are akin to those that ensued when Renaissance Europeans "got above" the landscape (long before the Montgolfier brothers came along). Contemplate Twittervision for about twenty minutes, feeling like Zola's secretary of society on absinthe, and you can't help but feel that same anxiety: is this landscape we see something we can actually deal with? Or is it the figuring forth of all that we cannot possibly comprehend and that which, consequently, is scary as hell?