The Best of Islands in the Clickstream
Still Great After All These YearsForward by the Author
Sometimes we have to look back in order to look forward. These articles, prose poems, “secular sermons,” call them what you will, were written as the digital era gathered momentum. People were flummoxed by the changes confronting them. Most focused on the specifics of their business or organization, but some wanted to know about the deeper implications of the digital revolution.
I wrote the first “Islands in the Clickstream” 25 years ago in response to a request from the Wisconsin Professional Engineers for a column for their magazine that addressed the question, “What is cyberspace?” They liked it and asked for another, then another. Meanwhile the Internet expanded and others requested my column attached to email, a new idea back then. Within a few years they were going to thousands of subscribers in sixty countries. Then Syngress, now part of Elsevier, asked to bring out a collection in 2004–my first book (I just published my sixth, a novel, Mobius: A Memoir).
You can buy the original complete Islands in the Clickstream via used book channels or from Elsevier as an ebook.
I am omitting most original dates of publication. References to existing technologies and events will tell you all you need to know about the context they addressed. The insights were genuinely prophetic–they illuminated how the digital world was restructuring our thinking, our identities, our opportunities, our entire global society.
The insights still apply. Islands in the Clickstream is more than current, it continues to be prophetic.
Take a look. See for yourself.
Richard Thieme
March 23 2021
