Book details of 'A World's Fair for the Global Village'

Title	A World's Fair for the Global Village
Author(s)	Carl Malamud
ISBN	0262133385
Language	English
Published	September 1997
Publisher	MIT Press

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
In retropect, of course, the idea of a World's Fair on the Internet (or, rather, the World Wide Web) seems an obvious concept. In retrospect, all great ideas seem obvious. But Malamud and cohorts actually did it, and it sounds like it was quite something. Malamud's account is, as always, readable, informative, and amusing. The story of the fair touches on a great many areas of technology, society, people, and politics. I must admit that I knew nothing about it. I knew about the "Day in the Life of the Net" book project, I knew about NetDay, and I knew about some of the other activities that were apparently part of the overall fair, but the fair itself seems to have slipped by me. I *may* have heard of it, but, if so, it didn't register. This fact may say something about my observational skills, the sheer scope and size of the net, or the impact of the fair relative to Malamud's impression of it. Take your pick. The Internet 1996 World Exposition claims five million visitors and one hundred million dollars worth of donated telecommuncations bandwidth. On the other hand, Netscape and such vital sites as playboy.com claim multiple millions of hits per day. On the third hand, Expo '86, as a class three exposition, had ten million individual visitors at a basic budget of three hundred million dollars. Is the Internet 1996 World Exposition important, and will it leave any legacy such as London's Crystal Palace or Paris' Eiffel Tower? Yes, and yes. The basic content of the fair itself is still, apparently, available at http://park.org. The pages, however, are not as important as the fact that it was done at all. The experiences involved, as recounted in the book, show once again that even such technically implicated government institutions as the patent office still do not realize the ramifications of the technology. A committed and informal group put together something that major information conglomerates could not match. A donation of services from a company that could only look forward to long term public goodwill suddenly made a direct, immediate, and unforseen contribution to the company's profits. A project seen as as an amusing exercise in community suddenly and substantially increased the world's effective networking capacity. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997
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Book description:

foreword by His Holiness The Dalai Lama afterword by Laurie Anderson "Carl Malamud was one of the pioneers who first realized the Internet would transform the world. In A World's Fair for the Global Village he takes us on a global odyssey and proves conclusively that it is the Net and the personal computer - not TV - that will finally make McLuhan's vision real." -- John Markoff When Carl Malamud set out to re-create the great world's fairs of the last century, he envisioned an event that took place all over the world, one where anybody could build a pavilion; a world's fair that embraced the new technologies of the Internet in the same way that past fairs embraced technologies such as radio and electricity. He bought seven around-the-world plane tickets and set off in search of volunteers to help build what he dubbed "a world's fair for the information age." In less than a year, Malamud and a grass-roots collection of engineers, artists, and other volunteers built the Internet 1996 World Exposition by convincing corporations to contribute close to $50 million in computers and telephone lines, and by garnering the support of a dozen heads of state, including Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. More than eighty countries built thousands of pavilions that attracted over 5 million visitors from 130 countries. Just as the 1893 World Columbian Exposition celebrated the modern new city of Chicago, the Internet 1996 World Exposition celebrated the arrival of the global village. A World's Fair for the Global Village is a behind-the-scenes look at the fair, from its inception through the closing ceremony. It includes profiles of the small group of people who made it happen, backstage glimpses into the elaborate preparations, visits to highlights of the pavilions and events, and visitors' comments. The reader sees how participants throughout the world seized the metaphor of a world's fair to build their own pavilions. The book comes with an audio CD and a CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows 95. Tech Support for the CD-ROM More information is available at our book-of-the-month site.