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

"Frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken." Thomas Kuhn Discovery 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements. Foreword by Richard Normann. About the Author. Preface. Chapter 1: Thomas Kuhn and the Internet. Chapter 2: The Pre-paradigmatic Internet. Chapter 3: Crisis and its Response. Chapter 4: From Appearance to Reality. Chapter 5: Resolving the Revolution. Chapter 6: The New Paradigm. Bibliography. Notes. Index.

About the Author :
Edward Burman is a Senior Partner of Ambrosetti, a leading Italian consultancy with a client list including major banks, manufacturing companies and public institutions. He runs the firm's e-Strategy practice and is a regular keynote speaker in both English and Italian. He sits on the boards of Ambrosetti Stern Stewart Italia, a wholly owned Ambrosetti company offering Stern Stewart services under licence in Italy, and Brainspark, a London-based venture capital company and business incubator. As a visiting lecturer he taught at the University of Kent from 1994 to 2000, and he is also a regular lecturer at Henley Management College. He is the author of eleven books on European historical and cultural issues.

Review :
"…a well-researched argument…will be interesting to re-read in a year’s time to see how the argument stands the test of time…" (The Shetland Times, 19 September 2003) “… Burman’s eloquence is more than enough to induce me to turn the page…”