How did I get here?

A narrative resumé or Curriculum Vitæ

My educational background is in the hard sciences - maths, physics, chemistry and biology of cells - though I took up journalism before qualifying. (King's, actually.)

One side-effect of this is that I began my legal career before the Lord Chief Justice, dusty wig and all, in the "Colonel B" case. We won in the House of Lords, and helped cause the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

Probably the wierdest thing I've written is the 6000-word record sleeve for Nagasaki Nightmare, a single by the anarcho-pacifist-punk-hardcore band Crass. (While looking up the Crass Web page I discovered that probably Björk's first large live gig was opening for Crass on 20 September 1983 in Reykjavik: isn't the Web wonderful?)

I have been using electronic communications daily since 1986. In March that year I arrived to start work at a small book publisher in Philadelphia, to be told "We have a branch on the West Coast. Connect us". The job description which I wrote myself in 1987 exactly matches the British Library's (1994) description of a publisher's working day in the year 2000.

On my return to the UK in 1989, I started working as a freelance science journalist. (Thinks: my legal history doesn't encourage Men In Suits to employ me; I can read science; and I can write English. Freelance... Science... Journalist".)

I obtained an internet connection, before there were any internet service providers. I did this in order to communicate with researchers in their native medium, well before there was a market for writing about the net.

Since 1992 I have contributed frequent articles to the Guardian (OnLine section), New Scientist, the Times Higher Education Supplement and others. Many of these articles concern various aspects of the economic, political and social implications of the new communications technologies.

You can find sample articles at: http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/articles/.

Several of those articles are extensively referenced in academic papers as prime sources on the issues they cover. In October 1996 I was taken aback to discover that I am cited in a US Department of Defense strategy paper on Low-Intensity Warfare (since disappeared from the Web).

I also work as a freelance editor, covering for section editors. I teach The Internet for Journalists, The Internet for Beginners and Web design for the National Union of Journalists and universities including City and Goldsmiths.

In October 1995 the information charity Panos published my report The Internet and the South: Superhighway or dirt- track? This has become a key document on Development issues and the internet (and has gathered me as much air-time, of both kinds, as anything else I've done).

In October 1996 I followed this up with a paper for the UN University's INTECH project, entitled The Internet: enabling whom, when and where?.

In 1994-95 was, in effect, about half the Digital Media Working Group of the National Union of Journalists. In December 1995 I gave the keynote presentation on the future of digital media to an International Federation of Journalists meeting in Amsterdam. I represent the NUJ on the European Federation of Journalists' Authors' Rights Expert Group.

I was a member of the Advisory Group to UKOLN, the UK Office for Library Networking based at Bath University from 1996, until the Advisory Group was disbanded in 1999. I participate actively in online discussions on the (largely US) cni-copyright list. At the World-Wide Web conference in Paris in May 1996 I was a participant in the experts' workshop on "internationalisation". (When I told my mother I was going to Paris for a Web conference she thought for a moment, got the point of the Web and asked "Why?")

In October 1997 I was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce and was startled to wake up one morning with Letters After My Name (albeit SMALL ONES). In fact, I only opened the letter after retrieving it from the bin, realisting it might not be the press release it first appeared to be.

In 1999 I was appointed to the Information Society Forum, the expert body advising the European Commission on matters relating to... the Information Society. That is, the social and economic implications of the communications revolution. I edited its Third Report, A European Way for the Information Society, published in February 2000.

Contact me in the first place by email at: mch@cix.co.uk