"Six Glasses" published in Britain
June 10, 2007
Two years after being published in America, my drinks book is finally published in Britain this week by Atlantic Books. Several people have asked whether the lack of postings here indicates that I am working on a new book, and the answer is yes -- though my new role at The Economist means I have less time to write books than I used to. But the wheels are turning.
My "Culture War" games article in Wired
April 28, 2006
The folks at Wired asked me to write a piece for the recent themed issue on video games. As an avid gamer, as well as a fan of historical analogy, I agreed, and duly delivered a pile of historical quotes in which previous new art forms (novels, waltzing, rock'n'roll) were denounced in much the same language that is being used to denounce video games today. I started down this path with my "Breeding Evil?" cover story in The Economist last summer, which noted one of the earliest examples of this trend, namely Socrates' suspicion (at least according to Plato) of written texts, which he deemed inferior to oral arguments on the grounds that books are insufficiently interactive. Anyhow, the piece I originally wrote for Wired had a much longer introduction, and contained several more historical quotes, so given the enthusiastic reaction this article has prompted -- it's been widely linked to and has generated a lot of e-mail in response -- I thought I ought to make the full version available. (It's a txt file, because I can't be bothered to mark it up.) Other reasons for publishing the full version are i) it provides all the sources and ii) because three academics -- Henry Jenkins, Dmitri Williams and Edward Castronova -- were very helpful in suggesting some of the sources for the quotes, but their names did not appear in the much boiled-down final version. Sorry, guys, and thanks for your help! So, here is the full version of "The Culture War".
PS Oh, and if you like this, you'll love Henry Jenkins' essay, "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked"; and given the various bizarre laws being proposed in the US at the moment, you might also appreciate Adam Thierer's paper, "Fact and Fiction in the Debate over Video Game Regulation".
Taking the Long View of Google
February 27, 2006
Given my passion for historical analogies, I was thrilled to be asked to take part in a documentary in BBC Radio 4's "Long View" strand. This is a program that draws historical analogies between modern and historical events -- in this case between the rise of Google and the 19th century Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which harnessed an older technology (the steam press) to similarly utopian ends (making knowledge more widely available). The show airs on Tuesday February 28th, at 9am and again at 9.30pm. Since we recorded the program, Google's shares have fallen somewhat. Indeed, once a company becomes so successful that these kinds of programs are made about it, you can't help but wonder if its best days are behind it.
The death of the telegram
February 26, 2006
One advantage of writing about obsolete technologies is that my books are far less liable to go out of date. Or, to look at it another way, my books are already out of date when they appear which, oddly, seems to give them a longer shelf life. "The Victorian Internet" was repeatedly recommended as a helpful book through which to understand the dotcom boom, during the boom itself, then through the crash, and now in the shiny new Google era. As recently as last year, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Fortune all recommended it -- it even topped the Journal's list of "Five Best Books on Business and the Internet". Not bad for a book that had its genesis a decade ago in an article I wrote for the Daily Telegraph, published in July 1996.
Anyway, having rounded off last year with a New York Times Op-Ed about wine snobbery derived from my "Six Glasses" book, this month I had to don my "Victorian Internet" hat once again, following the announcement by Western Union that it was shutting down its telegram service. I was asked to comment by NPR, the BBC, and many newspapers. And the Los Angeles Times invited me to write an Op-Ed on the subject, which sums up my thoughts on the topic. The main points: first, I was frankly surprised that telegrams were still going. Second, even though telegrams have now passed into history, at least in America, they have in a sense been reborn: in the past year or so, Americans have finally adopted the telegram-like medium of text messaging. This has resulted in a spate of hilarious articles explaining teenage texting and its strange, telegraphic abbreviations to baffled American grown-ups. (The same sort of articles appeared in the European press four or five years ago.) It took American consumers a while to adopt this technology, for a number of reasons, but now it seems they're finally catching up with the rest of the world. The telegram is dead; long live the telegram.
"Six Glasses" on "CBS Sunday Morning"
November 24, 2005
Over the summer CBS filmed a little segment about my book at various locations in London, including the Cutty Sark (where we discussed tea and rum), the Jamaica Wine House (a pub on the site of London's oldest coffeehouse), an American-style diner (to talk about Coca-Cola) and even at home (where I held one of my water tastings with friends). Well, it looks as though the result is finally going to air on CBS Sunday Morning on November 27th. Goodness knows what they'll include from all that footage. They even filmed me playing the drums. Everything takes ages when doing TV, but it was a lot of fun. Now, back to my Thanksgiving beer...
Water thoughts at Nobu
November 16, 2005
Today I went to a business lunch at Nobu in London, and I noticed that they'd changed the bottled water they serve. They used to serve Voss, a Norwegian water that comes in fancy cylindrical bottles, and which tastes much less pleasant than London tap water, at least in my opinion (in a blind tasting). But now they have switched to Fiji water. Perhaps they switched ages ago -- I don't get to go to Nobu that often. Anyway, this made me laugh for two reasons. The first is that in blind tastings, Fiji is the water that I find tastes most like London tap. So, I like it, but you might as well drink tap water. The second thing that made me laugh was that one of the people at the lunch, an American woman, said that friends had asked her whether London tap water was safe to drink. Of course it was, she said -- this isn't some developing country with bad water. Which is true, of course. But isn't it odd how people in one of the richest parts of the world will pay through the nose to drink water shipped all the way from a developing country where they probably wouldn't dare drink the tap water? (For an analysis of the economics of shipping water from Fiji, see Ethan Zuckerman's posting here.)
More water, and mea culpa
August 27, 2005
My sporadic campaign against bottled water continued this week in The Guardian, on Marketplace, and on KQED in San Francisco. My Guardian piece was a good opportunity to take in some of the ideas (such as water taxes and "ethical" water) that were suggested to me after the New York Times Op-Ed appeared. I was also able to make it clear that if you don't like the taste of your tap water, the next step should be to try filtering it, rather than simply giving in and buying bottled water.
So far I have yet to hear a good argument in defence of bottled water, and I'm not surprised, since there isn't one. One industry executive suggested to me that the bottled-water companies are really selling "portable hydration" rather than water. But even if this were a good reason to sell water in bottles (drinking fountains also provide portable hydration, as does tap water in a bottle) this does not account for all the bottled water sold. Yes, people buy water in small bottles on hot days. But the bulk of the industry's sales surely come from people buying big bottles, six at a time, in the supermarket, to drink at home instead of tap water. Surprisingly, nobody has yet advanced what I consider to be the best argument in defence of bottled water, namely that in a consumer-capitalist economy, people should be free to make dumb purchasing decisions: buying dodgy personal-fitness equipment from late-night infomercials, for example. This, of course, is the argument advanced by the tobacco industry. And it's true: people should be allowed to smoke themselves to death if they want to, or buy water that costs 10,000 times as much as tap water but is really no different, but only if they have all the facts. In the case of bottled water, most people don't have all the facts. I am doing what I can to remedy that, and if the e-mails I've received are anything to go by, people who have more of the facts think again about buying bottled water.
Now for the mea culpa. When writing the Guardian piece I found an error in my NYT Op-Ed. I wrote: "Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year." In fact, these figures are not to provide water and sanitation to everyone, but to meet the UN's target of reducing lack of access by half by 2015. I should have written, as I did in the Guardian: "The UN's goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water and sanitation by 2015 could be achieved for an outlay of around $11 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute." Mea culpa.
Finally, I have to share a story sent to me by a reformed bottled-water drinker. When living in Paris with her husband, she used to keep a bottle of Evian in the fridge, and refill it from the tap when it ran low. One day her husband complained. "Damn it," he said, "I wish you'd stop doing that. I can't tell if it's the good stuff or if...". A funny look came over his face as he realised what he was saying, and after that they stopped buying bottled water.
Games and mobiles
August 27, 2005
"Breeding Evil?", a leader and special report published this month examining the virtues of video games, was my second Economist cover of the year. My first, back in March, was "The real digital divide", about mobile phones in the developing world. (I have since written more on the topic -- see here and here.) Anyway, it seems particularly fitting to me that these should be the topics of my two covers, because whenever I'm asked what I regard as the hottest topics in technology, I always reply "mobile phones and gaming". (Voice-over-broadband comes third, I suppose, and energy technology is coming up the field fast. UPDATE September 2005: Lo and behold, my third cover of the year is about VOIP.)
Mobile phones are the most numerous digital devices on the planet, and truly deserve to be called "personal computers". And games consoles are the most powerful mass-produced computers in the world. So they are, if you like, at the cutting edge of computing quantity and quality respectively. Both also have interesting social consequences. We in the developed world have spent the past few years adjusting to mobile phones, texting and so on, but their impact in the developing world will be far greater, since they are the first communications devices to become really prevalent. (By the time mobiles started spreading in the rich world, we already had fixed-line phones and the internet, so mobiles made less of a difference.) Gaming is also interesting, because it is emerging as a new medium, up there with music and movies. That was the main point of my cover article: that new art forms are often criticised by people who aren't familiar with them and consider them to be evil. Rock'n'roll in the 1950s is another example.
The gaming piece generated more letters and e-mails than anything I have ever written for The Economist. Many were from gamers, who approved of the article, though a few of them thought I should have made more of the social nature of online role-playing games, which confound the stereotype of gamers as loners. (True, but such games are still a minority sport, even among gamers.) Several readers who disagreed with the article thought I had overlooked the many studies that show a link between gaming and violence. I am aware of these studies; but there are also lots of other studies that failed to find a link. Similarly, there are meta-analyses that look across all the studies -- but they too are contradictory. Some evaluations of the literature find clear evidence that gaming causes violence, while others do not.
Sound familiar? It does to me. This is exactly what is going on in the debate over mobile phones and cancer. There is lots of anecdotal evidence, and plenty of dodgy studies which come to no clear conclusion. (See "Mobile phones are probably safe, by analogy", below.) Of course, if mobile phones really were dangerous we ought to have noticed by now; the same is true of gaming. My article included this chart, which shows violent crime in America declining over the past decade as gaming became more popular. Many anti-gaming readers wrote in to complain that this chart posits a causal link: it doesn't. I am not suggesting (though some people are) that gaming makes people less violent. I am merely noting that gaming is now so widespread that if it did make people more violent, that ought to show up in the violent-crime figures, yet they are declining. The point of the chart is to demonstrate not causation, but lack of causation. Anyway, as with rock'n'roll, this argument will only be resolved by a generational shift, as the gamers (mostly under 40) grow up, and the non-gamers (mostly over 40) die out.
My diatribe against bottled water
August 3, 2005
I've had a lot of e-mail in response to my attack on bottled water, published as an Op-Ed in the New York Times (and the IHT, where you can still read it). Most people agreed with my stance. I heard from a dentist who pointed out that tap water has another advantage over bottled water that I did not mention: it contains fluoride which strengthens teeth. (That said, many people object to fluoridisation, for reasons I have never quite understood, particularly since some mineral waters contain higher levels of fluoride naturally.) A chemical engineer said he never drinks bottled water, since it is more likely than tap water to contain bacteria, and gets his children to refill water bottles from the tap. And a teacher wanted to know which water charity I recommended giving money to (my answer: Water Aid). Some people complained that their tap water tasted bad; fair enough, but I still recommend a blind tasting. Bottled water can taste bad too. Also, you could always try filtering your tap water. Other people noted that groundwater can be contaminated, so tap water is not always better than bottled water. True; but bottled water is not the answer to bad tap water, or is at least one of the least good answers I can think of. There are all kinds of clever filters being invented out there to deal with arsenic poisoning in particular. That kind of approach makes much more sense than resorting to expensive bottled water shipped around on lorries. I also heard about Ethos Water, an "ethical" bottled water firm; isn't that a step in the right direction? So I have put answers to all these questions, and a few more besides -- Where can you buy Roman wine? Why is my book not published in Britain? -- on a new "Six Glasses FAQ" page.
Coffee and number-crunching
June 28, 2005
One of the highlights of my recent American book tour was a visit to Starbucks HQ in Seattle. I explained about the coffeehouse internet, and the extent of coffee's influence on the course of history. As I was leaving I went past the Starbucks Map, which shows how many Starbucks coffeeshops there are in different countries of the world. There are over 9,000, around 6,000 of which are in the US. Since the population of the US is around 300m, that means there is roughly one Starbucks for every 50,000 people. In Britain, in contrast, there are a mere 451 Starbucks coffeeshops. The population of Britain is around 60m, so that works out at one Starbucks for every 133,000 people. In other words, there's probably room in the British market for twice as many Starbucks coffeeshops as there are at the moment. (Other chains also exist in both countries, of course.) You think that's scary? In London in 1700, one authority puts the number of coffeeshops at 3,000. The city's population at the time was around 600,000. So that's one coffeeshop for every 200 people. The figure of 3,000 is dubious, though, since it comes from a single source. It seems likely that the real figure was more like 1,000. But that's still a coffeeshop for every 600 people. What is the point of all this number crunching? Simply this. If you think today's cities are overrun by coffeeshops -- something I don't have a problem with, by the way -- the situation 300 years ago was far, far worse. (This all occurred to me today as I was filming with an American TV crew at the Jamaica Wine House -- a London pub on the site of the city's first coffeehouse, established in 1652. They even have an original advertising handbill from that year, "The Vertue of the Coffee Drink", hanging on the wall.)
The drinks that didn't make it
June 6, 2005
I'm a week into my book tour, and things seem to be going well. I've done 17 radio interviews, three television interviews, three print interviews and four signings in the past seven days. I've been favourably reviewed in The New York Times and got as high as #168 on Amazon.com and #69 on Amazon.ca -- not that I've been checking obsessively, you understand. Amazingly, I got my samples of stone-age beer, Roman wine and sailor's grog through both Canadian and US customs, and have even managed to get a couple of radio hosts to taste them on air. I squeezed in some sightseeing in Washington, DC (thanks, Kevin) and some holiday with my family in New York. I've been lucky enough to find Ommegang beers in several places. Most of all, though, I've enjoyed hearing people's reactions to the book and fielding questions about it.
One type of question comes up quite often: why didn't I include mead, chocolate, gin, cider or some other drink in the book? It's a good question. My original plan was to write an appendix on the drinks that didn't quite make it but, er, the appendix didn't quite make it either. The short answer is that those other drinks do not align with important historical forces in the way that my six drinks do. Chocolate was popular at the same time as coffee, for example, particularly in the south of Europe. But the action at the time was in England and the Netherlands, where coffee accompanied the scientific and financial revolutions of the period. Similarly, the gin epidemic that took place in London during the early 18th century is quite well known in Britain -- there have been a couple of recent books about it -- but was a local anomaly that resulted from deregulation of distillation in an attempt to prop up demand for cereal crops, and did not have any broader geopolitical implications. Mead is probably as old as (or older than) beer, but its production could not easily be scaled up, unlike the production of cereal grains, which is why the Egyptians and Mesopotamians drank beer. And so on. But perhaps I should write that appendix after all.
"Six Glasses" on tour
May 23, 2005
So, I'm about to go on the road promoting "A History of the World in Six Glasses" in the US and Canada for a couple of weeks. This will mainly involve lots of radio interviews, but also a few bookstore appearances. At some of these events I'll have samples of ancient beer, Roman wine and grog available for tasting -- local licensing laws permitting, that is. And assuming I can get the samples across the Atlantic and through customs without incident. Here are the dates, if you want to come and try them. My favourite is the Roman wine made with sea water.
May 30 - Toronto (University of Toronto Bookstore, 7.30pm)
May 31 - Washington, DC (Olsson's Bookstore, 7pm)
June 2 - Boston (Newton Free Library, Newton, MA, 7.30pm)
June 4 - New York (BookExpo America, Jacob Javits Convention Center, 4pm)
June 6 - Seattle (Village Books, Bellingham, WA, 7.30pm)
June 7 - Seattle (University Bookstore, 7pm)
June 8 - La Jolla (Warwick's Bookstore, 7.30pm)
June 10 - Calgary (McNally Robinson Bookstore, 8pm)
Books and blogs
May 22, 2005
I recently interviewed Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired and a former colleague of mine at The Economist, about his theory of The Long Tail, and its impact on the economics of e-commerce. (Gosh, it feels so 1999 to write something like that. Anyway, here is his original essay, and my summary of it in The Economist.) After the success of his original article on the subject, Chris is now turning it into a book, and he is blogging his thoughts as he goes along.
All of which got me to thinking about whether that's a good way to put a book together or not. I suspect that it's probably quite a good approach if you are advancing an argument, as Chris is, about the internet itself. There are lots of helpful and knowledgeable people who are reading his blog and stress-testing his ideas (though he is also doing a lot of behind-the-scenes research and econometrics). "I believe I will have a better book, but I fear it may be later," said Chris when I asked him how it was going. "The notion of beta-testing your ideas, giving to get something more, is the right way to make a good book."
I have a feeling, though, that this approach might not be so effective for the kinds of books that I write, since I tend to dig up obscure bits of history. I also worry that even considering a book-blog is merely a form of displacement activity. Whenever I start on a new book, I always consider using some new piece of software or something to organise my notes, do the bibliography, and so on. I always decide against it. It's the same with outliners -- I never use them, because I worry that I will end up fiddling with the tools rather than using them to do any work. (Instead, I always end up with a pile of plain text files, which are future-proof and easy to search.) I think that for me, a book-blog would pose a similar temptation. I hope it works out for Chris, but even he admits that it's too soon to say if it will. "I can't tell yet what my conversion rate will be for words-on-blog to words-in-book," he told me. "But if it's not better than 20%, I'm in trouble." His book is due next year.
"Six Glasses" on NPR's All Things Considered
May 14, 2005
I was interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday, mainly about beer in the ancient world, since they were doing a segment on beer. Alas, I was unable to participate in the subsequent on-air tasting, since I did the interview from London. But I was glad to see that the tasting included Anchor Steam, one of my favourite American beers. (For the record, others include Anchor Liberty Ale, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Pyramid Hefeweizen, and anything by Ommegang.) Anchor beer was appropriate for another reason: Fritz Maytag, head honcho at Anchor, is very interested in ancient beer and has recreated ancient Sumerian brews from the original recipes a couple of times. I visited him while researching the book, but he doesn't have any Sumerian beer available for tasting any more, so I couldn't taste it.
My new book is out -- in Italian, at least
May 12, 2005
The first edition of my new book, "A History of the World in Six Glasses", came out this month. Appropriately enough, given that I had the original idea for the book while on holiday in Italy, it's the Italian edition, "Una storia del mondo in sei bicchieri". I love the way it sounds in Italian. I can even understand bits of it, which is more than can be said for the German or Korean editions of my previous books. My Italian publisher, Codice Edizione, launched the book at the Turin Book Fair, and it got a good write-up in La Stampa. Codice even threw a rooftop party with six tables, each with its own drink, plus appropriate food (hamburgers with the Coca-Cola, for example). Obsessive that I am, I duly drank all six drinks -- in the correct historical order, of course. And with the US and Canadian editions coming out at the beginning of June, I have finally put up a dedicated page for the new book, which has just received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.
Mobile phones are probably safe, by analogy
January 2005
You've guessed it, another analogy. Every December my literary agent, John Brockman of EDGE, sends out a question to many of the world's leading thinkers and scientists. Somehow I have ended up being included on his list, though I am clearly small fry among some very big fish indeed. Anyway, this year's question was: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" My answer: I believe mobile phones are safe, based on an argument by historical analogy. They are, I reckon, merely the latest example of a familiar pattern: anecdotal evidence suggests that a technology might be harmful, and however many studies fail to find evidence of harm, there are always calls for more research. Selected answers to the EDGE question are the published in newspapers around the world; my answer was one of those selected by the Daily Telegraph, for example. By complete coincidence, a new British study was released the following week advising children not to use mobile phones. Actually, it wasn't really a new study, just an analysis of previous studies into the effects of mobile phones, most of which are flawed or inconclusive. So why did the British experts come to a more cautious conclusion than other observers, when faced with the same evidence? The answer is simple: BSE. Ever since the mad-cow fiasco, the British government has taken an ultra-cautious attitude to public health; it has given up trying to explain that you can't prove a negative. Anyway, until a study showing harm from mobile phones shows up, and is then replicated, I stand by my answer.
Just call me Janus, since I'm two-faced
January 2005
This month I had a piece in Technology Review drawing an analogy between Marconi's early spark-gap radios and modern ultrawideband devices. Glenn Fleishman picked up on it on his blog, and coined a novel term for my habit of hyperlinking past and present: "Janus writing, in which the developments of the present are recontextualised in terms of their origins in the past." Which seems appropriate, particularly since this month is named after Janus: it's the month when we look both backwards and forwards in time.
My next book
December 2004
It's time to spill the beans about my next book, "A History of the World in Six Glasses". Shockingly, it does not follow the format of my previous three books, which look at historical technologies in the light of modern ones. No, this time I connect the present and the past in a different way, and I do it six times, through different drinks. Yes, drinks.
Just as archaeologists divide history up into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and so on, I have divided up the history of humankind by drink. I start with beer in the Neolithic period, and then proceed through wine in Greece and Rome, spirits in the Age of Exploration, coffee in the Age of Reason, tea and the British Empire, and ending up with Coca-Cola, the rise of America, and globalisation. All of these beverages emerged as the dominant drinks in particular historical periods, illuminate the links between different cultures, influenced the course of history in unexpected ways, and are still drunk today. It's history through the bottom of a glass: my aim is to make you see your favourite drink in a new, historically informed light.
Of course, each drink is a kind of technology, so this is not as different from my previous books as it might appear: as usual, I'm really writing about the social impact of technology, as changing circumstances repeatedly cause different drinks to come to the fore. Most drinks were water purification technologies, and many doubled as currencies, status symbols or medicines. As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun doing the research. The book will be out next year in various parts of the world: so far only Random House in Canada has put up a page. My own page will follow shortly.
One final note: this book does not have a subtitle. My US publisher, George Gibson at Walker & Co. in New York, invented the brief-history genre with "Longitude", which led to a flurry of similar books (including my own). One distinguishing feature of such books is that they usually have long subtitles, along the lines of "the amazing story of XXX and how it changed our world". But lately the subtitles have been getting out of hand; George says it's verging on self-parody. Some books even have two subtitles. So George is now backing away from subtitles; and where he leads, others often follow. I suppose I really ought to write this whole subtitle thing up as an Economist story. Oh, wait, someone has done it already.
Farewell to the Turk
November 2004
This month I have been doing a few last Turk-related things before my next book comes out. First I appeared (or perhaps spoke would be the more accurate word) on Adam Hart-Davis' Radio 4 programme, "The Eureka Years", which looks at the inventions from a particular year -- in this case, 1769, the year of the Turk's creation. Then I gave a talk at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, as part of their "Between the Lines" series, in which authors explain the stories behind their books and the challenges they faced in writing them. So I talked about the difficulty of separating Turk-related myth from fact and the help I received from the various Turk enthusiasts around the world (whom I have collectively dubbed the Turk mafia).
What? More analogies?
September 2004
Perhaps the most unexpected (or even, to some people, offensive) analogy I have written about is that between the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. I chaired a pharma conference in Philadelphia this month -- not my specialist subject, but someone else dropped out, and it turned out to be very interesting. The drug giants currently face an unprecedented onslaught of class-action lawsuits and public scrutiny; industry bosses are being grilled by lawmakers asking who knew what and when. It is all reminiscent of what happened to the tobacco industry in 1994. So who better to advise them how to handle the crisis than a man from Philip Morris? Also this month I looked at the overused analogy between the games industry and Hollywood, and new figures showed that my predictions last year about wireless number portability in America not being a big deal -- based on comparisons with Hong Kong and Australia -- were correct. Finally, I have updated my "Other stories" page with some old analogy stories, including one on the hypertext of Leonardo, and another looking at the economics of Babbage's mechanical computer versus Moore's Law. OK, enough with the analogies already. (Yeah, sure.)
Yet more analogies
September 2004
Long-term historical analogies are my favourite kind, but it seems that I am using analogies more and more in my business reporting too. As well as comparing airlines to telecoms firms, I have also recently compared mobile-phone handset-makers to carmakers. (The handset industry is usually likened to the PC industry, but this is exactly the fate the handset-makers are doing their best to avoid; carmaking is a more accurate analogy.) Alongside this piece I also argued in a leader that mobile phones are the new cars: they are the dominant technology of self-expression for urban youth. (I use "urban" here in its original sense of "living in cities" rather than its modern sense as a euphemism for "black"; the trend is most visible in Asia.) Previous generations made a statement through their choice of car, customised accordingly; now phones have taken on the same role.
easyMobile -- it's all my fault
September 2004
Last November I wrote an article looking at the many similarities between airlines and telecoms firms. Both industries consist of carriers serving routes on a global network. Both were dominated by state-owned monopolies that have now mostly been privatised, but remain sources of national pride. All of which suggests that telecoms, like airlines, ought to be vulnerable to attack by low-cost carriers. This article was read by Stelios Haji-Iaonnou, the serial entrepreneur behind easyJet, a low-cost airline, and he decided this argument made sense. So he is now setting up easyMobile, an idea he freely admits he got from my article.
The coffeehouse internet
December 2003
The Christmas edition of The Economist gives journalists on the magazine a chance to let their hair down and write longer articles on subjects beyond the usual scope of the weekly edition. My contribution this year was a piece on the coffeehouse internet, which looks at the internet-like role played by coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries. They acted as information exchanges for scientists, politicians and businessmen, and were particularly popular in London. In the days before regular postal deliveries, coffeehouses were also used as mailing addresses. Regulars would pop in a couple of times a day to check for new mail and hear the latest news and gossip. Sounds like the internet to me; expect more of the same in my next book.
Beyond the telecoms bubble
October 2003
It's that time of year again: survey time. This means I get five weeks to write about 12,000 words on a single subject. It's rather like doing a short book. This year's topic: the trillion-dollar telecoms industry, which is in something of a mess following the bursting of the technology bubble. But, I argue, things are not as bad as they look. There is still scope for growth in mobile phones, broadband and various whizzy new kinds of internet services for large companies. Inevitably, there's a telegraph reference in there too.