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The Network as a Half-Empty Cup
Review by Ray Duncan
Copyright (C) Dr. Dobb's Journal, December, 1995
The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the
one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence
finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last
barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly
to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to
say to each other and many more ways not to say it.
-- Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers
Publishers have left no stone unturned in their mad rush to exploit the
public's fascination with the Internet. There's an unending deluge of books
and articles on every conceivable subtopic, including (for the technologically
challenged) vague but glorious speculations about the Internets impact on
society, authored by New Age Polyannas ranging from Howard Rheingold to
Timothy Leary. But Sir Isaac Newton told us that for every lash there is
an equal and opposite backlash, and perhaps it was inevitable that some
publishers would choose to go after the doom-and-gloom market niche instead.
Silicon Snake Oil, by Clifford Stoll, and The Future Does Not
Compute, by Stephen Talbott, present us with an interesting study in
contrasts. Talbott is a former presidential scholar and currently a senior
editor for O'Reilly & Associates, a premier hard-core technical publishing
house. Stoll is, of course, the astronomer turned network hacker turned
Internet-security expert and purveyor of cookie recipes, a celebrity of
sorts as a result of his previous book, The Cuckoo's Egg.
Talbott's book is the philosophical descendant of Joseph Weizenbaum's landmark
work Computer Power and Human Reason (W.H. Freeman, 1976). It is
thoughtful, learned, and provocative. The Internet, while an important focus
of the book, is not by any means the only focus; Talbott addresses a broad
range of issues centered on the inexorable mechanization, depersonalization,
and derealization of the world by increasingly pervasive computer and communications
technology, and the replacement of value-oriented, experience-based human
judgments by rule-based bureaucracies and corporate information systems.
I will say before anything else that I strongly urge all of you to buy and
read this book.
I was especially impressed with Talbott's analysis of computer-based education
in general, and Seymour Papert in particular. Many of us have deep-seated
doubts and fears about the trend toward the replacement of teacher-child
interactions with computer-based tutorials and games, the preoccupation
with computer literacy, and the introduction of small children to control
of a fantasy world via Logo and Basic programming. Talbott has articulated
the dangers of this trend in a few pithy chapters that should be force-fed
to every elementary-school administrator, teacher, and well-meaning PTA
hell-bent on computer lab fund-raising.
Talbott occasionally strays onto shakier ground as the issues get closer
to home. For example, I found his warnings about the insidious dangers of
computer-based word-processing rather laughable. Talbott feels that the
ease with which words can be set down with a computer leads willy-nilly
to undisciplined, automatic writing:
I sit at my keyboard and produce all letters of the alphabet
with the same undifferentiated, inexpressive, purely percussive strokes.
Words, phrases, endless streams of thought flow effortlessly from me in
all directions, with so little inner participation that I have reached the
opposite extreme from the ancient word-self unity. I spew out my words easily,
unthinkingly, at no psychic cost to myself, and launch them into a world
already drowning in its own babble. And as I produce my own words, so I
will likely judge those of others, discounting them as the superficial disjecta
membra they too often really are.
No doubt Gutenberg, and later the manufacturers of the first typewriters,
were similarly taxed with complaints by the scribes of their eras. However,
I must admit that the structure of Talbott's book, when compared to a classic
like Weizenbaum's, lends some unwitting support to this particular argument.
The traditional painstaking, tightly reasoned development of a thesis over
the course of a chapter has been replaced by collections of subsections
that are essentially extended thoughts of 500-800 words each, the literary
counterpart to TV sound bites. It is almost as though the author wrote his
musings on index cards, sorted them by keyword, and divided the whole stack
into chapters at arbitrary boundaries of several thousand words. Perhaps
this is the style of the future, but I don't feel entirely comfortable with
it.
Turning our attention from the sublime to the ridiculous, as it were, it
is time to say a few words about Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil. Sadly,
a far better title for this book would have been Publishing Snake Oil
-- it represents a cold-blooded, cynical attempt to capitalize on Internet
hysteria and Stoll's good name with a book that has literally almost nothing
useful or original to say. The meat in this book would barely suffice for
an Op-Ed column in Infoworld, but Stoll rambles on with vaguely formed opinions,
half-baked musings, unsubstantiated prophecies of doom, and outright whining
for nearly 250 pages. Cuckoo's Egg was written from the heart and
was vivid and entertaining, but this book is the Heaven's Gate of
computer trade-book publishing -- avoid it.
The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst
Stephen L. Talbott
OReilly & Associates, 1995
502 pp., $22.95
ISBN 1-56592-085-6
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway
Clifford Stoll
Doubleday Publishing, 1995
247 pp., $22.00
ISBN 0-385-41993-7
Electronic Review of Computer Books
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