Inventor-Heroes of the Internet
Let's take a page from Susan Douglas's concept of the "inventor-hero" in media coverage of new communication technology. Who are the inventor-heroes of today? My brainstorm:
Sergey Brin (google)
Larry Page (google)
Tim Berners-Lee (web)
Linus Torvalds (linux)
Jeff Bezos (amazon)
David Filo (yahoo)
Jerry Yang (yahoo)
We could even have a separate list for mischievous boy-wonders:
Shawn Fanning (napster)
It is possibly interesting that the Internet itself does not have inventor heroes in the same way the Web and Web-based applications do. I mean, we could say that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and their peers are the closest, but there hasn't been the same sort of "founding myth" surrounding the Internet technology itself. Maybe this is because there was little popular awareness of the Internet at the time they were doing their most important work -- the process of invention in this way is a creation of the media coverage for the invention, and not something that depends upon what people like Cerf and Kahn actually did.
One other reason: All (?) of the people I brainstormed in the list above can have a "young tinkerer" story told about them in a way that an academic computer scientist can't. These people were college students and small entrepreneurs, not professional researchers. We love the story of the small independent -- David vs. Goliath -- etc. Jobs and Wozniak at Apple get a kind of cred that Thomas J. Watson (founder of IBM) does not. This is a preference we could trace from American cultural ideas about what kind of technology is good and what kind is bad (see The Machine in the Garden).
It is interesting how little has changed since 1920! Tinkering is still masculine. Youth is still a key component of stories about inventors. The media are still key to promoting invention myths. One reaction (as we discussed) is that Dogulas's idea of a shifting definition of masculinity (c. 1920) that must be satisfied by garage tinkering doesn't make sense. That is: Is urbanization and the move away from the farm suggesting technology as a route to triumph over nature? I'm not sure. If this isn't the motivation for basement inventors today, what is?