John Naughton (born 1946) is an Irish academic, journalist and writer based in the United Kingdom since 1968. He has worked at the Open University since 1972, and has held the title of Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology since 2006.
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John Naughton was born and raised in Ireland, that part of which he himself describes as being “like the edge of the world—in a remote part of rural Ireland, in a household with few books, magazines, or television.”[1]
As a boy, John Naughton was a great wireless[2] fan, especially of short wave. Of all the things that interested him about the wireless-technology of the time it was the short wave radio that held the key to what he later recognized was a link to the present World Wide Web: “For this [short-wave radio] was a technology which belonged not to great corporations or governments, but to people.”[3] For Naughton, the early days of radio mirror and inform the experience of the early days of the Internet (the Net) and the World Wide Web.
In 1968 he moved to the United Kingdom.
Naughton went to primary school with the Christian Brothers and with the Jesuits. Later, he studied engineering at University College Cork and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate he became involved with student politics, and as a consequence started to write for newspapers and developed his writing skills.[4]
John Naughton met his second wife Sue in England while working together on a project at the Open University. They had two children. Sue died in 2002 after a battle with cancer.[4] He also has two sons from an earlier marriage to Carol, who died in 2008.
Naughton started working as an academic in the Open University's systems workgroup in 1972, and has worked at the Open University ever since. He was appointed as Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University in 2006. [5]
Naughton is Director of the Wolfson College, Cambridge Press Fellowship Programme, and a non-executive director of Ndiyo and Cambridge Visual Networks Ltd.[5] He is also Academic Advisor to the Arcadia Fellowship Project at Cambridge University Library and an Advisory Board Member at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Naughton has also worked with Newnham Research and Exbiblio.
He is an electrical engineer and also works as a journalist.[5]
Naughton wrote a book which has become a standard on the history of the Internet, A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet, Phoenix Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7538-1093-X
A television critic of The Observer in the 1980s, he now writes a weekly column for the newspaper's Business Section,[5] "The Networker", writing in defence of Wikipedia amongst many other topics.