(only real celebrities like Andy Tanenbaum have Frequently Asked Questions)
| You were born in Ireland but have lived in England since 1968. Have you gone native?
Certainly not (indignantly). I’m an Irish citizen and very proud of it. But I love living in England. And of course it’s where I have gainful employment. How and where were you educated?
At school: by the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. At university: University College,Cork and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. What’s your profession? I’m a control engineer with a strong interest in systems analysis and computer networks. One of my colleagues once defined systems analysis as “operations research plus megalomania”. He went on to say that I specialised in the latter. It says on the blurb of your book that you’ve been an academic and a journalist all your working life. How come? When I was an undergraduate I became heavily involved in student politics and in the process got to know some newspaper editors who asked me to write articles for them. So I did — and to my astonishment they sent money in return. Figuring that this was a great racket I continued to do it. One of my famous fellow-countrymen, Conor Cruise O’Brien has also been an academic and a journalist all his life. He describes it as “having a foot in both graves”. I try and keep the two sides of my life separate. My journalistic mates think I must be a good academic on the grounds that I’m not much of a journalist, while my academic colleagues think I must be a good journalist (on the grounds that…). They’re both wrong. How long have you worked at the Open University? Since 1972. I’m now Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology. Nice title, don’t you think? That’s over 30 years in the same outfit. Not much career development, eh? I’m a bit suspicious of the idea of a ‘career’ — it sounds like something out of control. It’s a media concept like ‘lifestyle’. I came to the OU promising myself that I would leave when I got bored. I’m still there, and have neve done the same thing twice. I once turned down a Chair at another university, partly because I couldn’t bear the idea of living in its vicinity, but mainly because the OU is a great place to work. Most engineers can’t write and most writers can’t engineer. What’s got into you? It’s not true that engineers can’t write — think of Robert Musil or Henry Petrosky. The idea that there’s a dichotomy between writing and engineering is a peculiarly British idea, a product of the absurd way children are made to specialise in arts or sciences at an early age in this country. I was educated in Ireland where it was commonplace for students to take Applied Mathematics as well as English and History for Leaving Certificate (A-level equivalent). What gives you most pleasure in life? Personally: my children (I have four, two of whom are still at home). Academically: (a) seeing the light bulb go on in a student’s head, (b) the ambient IQ of good universities. Journalistically: HL Mencken once said that the function of journalism was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. I like to see both done well. What’s your pet hate? Anybody who is absolutely certain of anything, closely followed by people who don’t use apostrophes. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? The death, after a long battle against cancer, of my beloved Sue. Do you enjoy writing? I enjoy having written. What’s your favourite book? Ulysses by James Joyce. I try and re-read it every year, and I always celebrate Bloomsday. The runners-up are To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf , and The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. What’s the book you would most like to have written? Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. You’re a Fellow of a Cambridge College. What do you do there? I’m Director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme. This is a scheme which brings journalists in mid-career to Cambridge for a Term to research a project of their own choosing. It’s been running continuously since 1982 and so far has welcomed nearly 300 journalists from 45 countries. What concerns you most about modern culture? Cultural relativity. People’s unwillingness to recognise excellence which cannot be measured by bean-counters. The increasing obsession with controlling ‘intellectual property’. Do you have any hobbies? Staring into space, smoking a politically-incorrect cigar. Once upon a time I was a serious photographer. Do you have any heroes? I’m suspicious of the idea. If one must have heroes, it’s better if they’re dead — though even then they’re not safe from revisionist historians. But here’s a list of some people I admire or whose memory I celebrate.
Sports? Most sports leave me cold. I do not understand cricket, though I recognise the hypnotic fascination it has for some. I tend to George Bernard Shaw’s view about it. “The English”, he said, “are not a spiritual people so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity”. I did, however, play golf fanatically from the age of ten to 22, and was good enough at it to have sleepless nights worrying about playing to my handicap. This explains the presence of Jack Nicklaus in the list above. What have you written? Prodigious amounts of journalism, most of it ephemeral. A good deal of Open University course material. A few research papers. A book on the history and significance of the Internet. I keep an online diary. Who are your favourite prose stylists? Macaulay, Lytton Strachey and AJP Taylor, closely followed by John Updike, J.K. Galbraith and Robert Hughes. What are you working on now? A programme of short online courses for the Open University; a collection of essays about technology, software and society; a memoir . Why did you write a history of the Net? Partly to satisfy my own curiosity. Mainly to celebrate the engineers and computer scientists who created this marvellous thing. What else do you do? You mean besides my day jobs? Occasional consulting work for organisations which are trying to sort out an Internet strategy, or grappling with messy problem situations that they are finding hard to characterise. I sometimes give keynote addresses to industry conferences. I’m also a founding partner of Ellipsian, a Cambridge-based ideas factory, and of Ndiyo, an international project which is doing great things. |
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