Walter Isaacson, the biographer known for his works on Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, has released two chapters of his upcoming book online with the idea of soliciting feedback from the community. He shared the chapters on Medium.com, a tool for building collaborative stories online.
The book is called The Birth of Online, which explores the history of the Internet. “Online collaboration is why the Internet was originally built, and I’m interested in any comments or corrections readers might want to make before I publish in a year,” he explained on the post about why he decided to share his work in advance.
Isaacson told TechCrunch that he has made factual changes to the book based on the feedback he has been getting from online readers.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
The personal computer became a neat tool for individual productivity, but it was a retreat from the vision of computers as devices for communication, collaboration and community formation. It moved us a little further away from, rather than closer to, the vision originally propounded by Vannevar Bush of machines that would augment our intelligence while connecting us to others and to repositories of information.