Designing for the Social Web

the creativity of the individual scribe and gave image and word equal billing, Wright sees the antecedent of today’s multimedia culture. The printing press would usher in an age of relentlessly textual, massproduced bookmaking, representing a shift from a right-brained, orally and visually charged world of folk traditions and feminine wisdom to one of masculine, logical, left-brained science. The ensuing explosion of printed matter led to an ontological and organizational crisis that we are still dealing with today. The chapter “The Industrial Library”—a wonderful refresher on library history—explores efforts to tame the rising flood of published knowledge by the likes of Panizzi, Cutter, Dewey, and Ranganathan. One of the most fascinating chapters of the book is “The Web That Wasn’t,” a look at early imaginings of the Internet. Many of the Web prototypes mentioned were strikingly prescient, and some had features (such as unbreakable links, bidirectional hypertext, and associative trails) that are superior to today’s Web. A few quibbles: the chapter on the encyclopedia—revolutionary in its ambition and its leveling of all types of knowledge—is too short; Web 2.0 is touched upon, but never adequately addressed; and the book could have used better editing. Wright has a tendency to repeat and rephrase his points, and there is a reference to a non-existent Appendix E. Those concerns aside, the book does a fine job of synthesizing many disparate ideas from a wide range of disciplines into a cohesive, thoughtful, and readable whole.