The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe, Volumes I and II . Elizabeth Eisenstein. Cambridge University Press; 1979.

I cannot recommend this book enough. This is the one that triggered my first thinking about how our times are similar to those of early modern Europe. It is an academic book, certainly not a quick read, but well worth the effort.

A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portait of an Age. William Manchester. Little, Brown and Company; 1992.

The corruption of Rome and the Church in this time period is difficult to accept. This book provides the setting for key events of the period. This one is an entertainer.

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind . George Lakoff. The University of Chicago Press; 1987.

Lakoff is a linguist; this book describes his theory of language based on idealized cognitive models. The title refers to an aboriginal language in which women, fire and dangerous things belong to the same category. As we understand more about language, our choices of categories and their labels appears increasingly subjective. Lakoff demonstrates how ordinary language cannot be based on the classical notion of categories as groups in which all members have common properties. I believe that access to new points of view via the Internet will bring about a new understanding of objectivity and subjectivity; Lakoff's work may explain why "better" truth may emerge from diverse knowledge structures interlinked over the Web.

Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas. Norbert Wiener. The MIT Press; 1994.

Although Wiener died in 1964, he had already seen and warned of the dangers of over-specialization. This book helped me to think about Silicon Valley's "invention in search of a market" problem as a fundamental marketing failure, not an engineering one. Wiener suggests that without a wide range of interests, we will often fail to notice when we have invented something useful. If you enjoyed "A Whack on the Side of the Head," you'll like this one.

Why Americans Hate the Media. James Fallows. Atlantic Monthly; Volume 277, No. 2; page(s) 45-64, February 1996.

A good look at how major news media operate and what is wrong. Not much hope in this article, however.

Commentary on Fallows' article: PBS interview with Bob Woodward

Earth. David Brin . Bantam; 1991.

I love this novel; I've read it three times. It is speculative science fiction focused on environmental issues, but it contains many thought-provoking ideas about the future of networks and information technologies, including freedom and privacy. David has developed the latter into a non-fiction book, The Transparent Society (see article). A venture capitalist friend recommended the book to me; it was the seed for some of the ideas in my essay, The Internet and the Anti-Net. In a wonderful example of Internet serendipity, a number of people forwarded the essay to David. One morning I awoke to find an e-mail from him; since then, we've become friends and I  had the privilege of reading the manuscript of The Transparent Society, now available.

Within the Context of No Context. George W.S. Trow. Atlantic Monthly Press;1981, 1997.

Not a book, but an essay, this work has some of the best mimicry of television-style communication -- series of present-tense snippets that hammer home Trow's passionate, ruthless picture of mass media in America.