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the digital dystopia
This page highlights
the digital dystopia, visions from left and right about
digital technology as the death of whatever the author
holds sacred: books, television, spelling, short hair.
the techno-apocalyptic
For fans of the techno-apocalyptic
there's a more extreme view in Paul Virilio's Open Sky (London,
Verso
97) and The Information Bomb (London, Verso 00): French
philosophy may not be dead but it sure smells that way.
Paul Levinson's The
Soft Edge: A Natural History & Future of the Information Revolution
(London, Routledge 98) is another 'Third Wave' tract from the author of Digital
McLuhan: A Guide To The Information Millennium (London, Routledge
99).
Derrick de Kerckhove's The Skin of Culture: Investigating The New
Electronic Reality (London, Kogan Page 97) is a 'Release 2 point
something' for the McLuhanite left: a "manifesto of
psychotechnology" to use the words of Pierre Levy.
Levy is the author of
jargonfest Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World In
Cyberspace (Cambridge, Perseus 97) another 'Jack Derrida meets the Internet' tract, replete
with babble such as "the utterance results in a finished product
that is finalized rather than an open-ended dynamic of voice composition
and message negotiation". Uh huh.
You might find more sustenance in
The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Uni of Chicago
Press 63) by Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver and in Andrew Odlyzko's The
history of communications and its implications for the Internet (PDF).
retro chic
Among the jeremiahs Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil -
Second Thoughts On The Information Highway (Doubleday, New York
1995) and High-Tech Heretic: Reflections by a Computer Contrarian
(Doubleday, New York 1999) reach the entirely unsurprising conclusion
that a life does not necessarily equal being online and indeed that the
non-digital world, unlike Broadway, is alive and well. There's somewhat
more bite in Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear
Power, Information Technology & Biotechnology
((Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 95) edited by Martin
Bauer.
Sven Birkets' romantic
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading
in An Electronic Age (Boston, Faber 94) is an upmarket version of
Barry Sanders' potboiler A Is For Ox: The Collapse of
Literacy & The Rise of Violence In An Electronic Age
(New York, Vintage 95): television = moral collapse +
spiritual impoverishment. If only it was that simple.
Rebels
Against the Future: The Luddites & Their War on the Industrial
Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (New York, Perseus 96)
by Kirkpatrick Sale suffers from oxygen starvation and compares
unfavourably with the great EP Thompson. Ted 'Unabomber' Kaczynski
carried the war to 'the enemy' with a parcel bomb or two.
Neil Postman's Building
A Bridge To The 18th Century: How The Past Can Improve Our
Future (New York, Knopf 99) - come back, dead white males,
all is forgiven - builds on the sentiments in his Technopoly:
The Surrender of Culture To Technology (New York, Vintage
93) and Richard Sclove's Democracy & Technology
(New York, Guilford 95).
Postman tugs the heart strings but, we think, looks decidedly
self-indulgent when viewed from the perspective of Leo Marx's The
Machine In The Garden: Technology & The Pastoral Ideal In
America (New York, Oxford Uni Press 67), Langdon Winner's Autonomous
Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in
Political Thought (Cambridge, MIT Press 77) and the
essays in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology &
the American Future (Cambridge, MIT Press 89) edited
by Joseph Corn.
There are more insights (and entertainment) in Talking Back To The Machine (New
York, Copernicus 99), a collection of essays for the Association For
Computing Machinery edited by Peter Denning and in Computerization
& Controversy: Value Conflicts & Social Choices,
(San Diego, Academic Press 96) edited by Charles Dunlop
& Rob Kling.
Jeremy Rifkin, in The Age of Access:
The New Culture Of Hypercapitalism Where All Of Life Is A Paid-For
Experience (New York, Tarcher 00) is another diatribe from
dyspeptic-by-numbers Jeremy Rifkin. In 1992 the world would end because
we were eating beef, the end of work was in sight in 95, next was
biotech, now its the Internet.
Theodore Roszak's The Cult Of
Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise On High Tech, Artificial
Intelligence & The True Art Of Thinking (Berkeley, Uni of
California Press 96) is characteristically overstated.
We recommend
instead Dan Schiller's Digital Capitalism:
Networking the Global Market System (MIT, Cambridge 1999) and paper
Ambush on the I-Way:
Commoditization on the Electronic Frontier.
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