By David Abrahamson
Northwestern University
Prefatory Note: What follows is a discursive compilation of more that four-hundred-and-fifty
items, most of fairly recent authorship, united by a common -- though very
broadly defined -- topical concern: the recent advent of great advances in
information technology and the digital culture that is arising thereupon.
While both the items chosen and the evaluative briefs that accompany the citations
are, perforce, somewhat idiosyncratic, the compilation will certainly have
served its purpose well if it nonetheless forms a possibly useful starting
point for any engagement with the subject.
I. technology (SOCIAL ASPECTS, globalization and world politics)
This section focuses on works which examine how technology changes the world
socially and politically. This includes how technology, particularly the computer
and the Internet, change the everyday lives of Americans and how they think
about themselves.
Alcorn, Paul A. Social Issues in Technology: A Format for Investigation.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997: A textbook of methods for the
study of technology and society, emphasizing parameters for study rather than
conclusions about technology's impact on society.
Anders, Peter. Envisioning Cyberspace: Designing 3-D Electronic Spaces.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998: A highly intellectualized description of how
space is used in human thought and the way space and thought are affected
by computers and virtual reality; also argues that cyberspace is an extension
of the human mind and body.
Abramson, Jeffrey B., Arterton, F. Christopher and Orren, Gary R. The
Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic
Politics. New York: Basic Books, 1988: The result of a three-year study
done in the mid-1980s at Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Institute
of Politics, it speculates on the effects that new forms of communication
(satellite, cable, VCRs and computers) have on elections, governance and citizen
participation.
Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. "A New Epoch and Spectrum of Conflict."
In John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds. In Athena's Camp: Preparing for
Conflict in the Information Age. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1997.: 1-20:
Part of an anthology by defense intellectuals on preparing for conflict in
the Information Age.
Banks, Michael A. Web Psychos, Stalkers, and Pranksters. Scottsdale,
AZ: Coriolis Group Books, 1997: A how-to guide to protecting your privacy
on the Net.
Barber, John F. "A Brief, Selective, and Idiosyncratic History of Computers."
In Howard, Tharon and Benson, Chris, eds. Electronic Networks: Crossing
Boundaries, Creating Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999:
22-50: An anthology of essays suggesting ways to incorporate computers, the
Internet and other forms of technology into school curriculum and arguing
that students can benefit from both learning about technology and using technology.
Barglow, Raymond. The Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information:
Computer, Dolphins, and Dreams. New York: Routledge, 1994: A Postmodernist
"critical psychology" study examining the effect of computers on the concept
of self.
Bell, Daniel. "Communication Technology: For Better or Worse," in Jerry
L. Salvaggio, ed. The Information Society: Economic, Social, and Structural
Issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989: 89-103: An essay
on postindustrial or information society.
Beniger, James R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic
Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986: Postulates a "Control Revolution" starting in the late 1800s
based on the emerging primacy of information equal in import and in fact
driven by the speeding up of society's material processing systems during
the Industrial Revolution.
Bijker, Wiebe E. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory
of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995: A SCOT (Social
Construction of Technology) study presenting a theory of sociotechnical change
that explores the sociological influences on technology and vice versa. Uses
as examples the development of the bicycle, Bakelite and fluorescent lighting.
Bolter, J. David. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984: Discusses the relationship
between man and machine, examining repercussions of seeing both humans and
computers as machines and offering the suggestion that computers should be
viewed as tools for humanity, not as machines that can replace humanity.
Bolter, Jay David. "Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of Self." In
Strate, Lance; Jacobson, Ronald L. and Gibson, Stephanie B., eds. Communication
and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press, 1996: 105-1119: An essay from Writing Space on how
electronic and graphics are replacing print in the role of the construction
of self.
Brecher, Jeremy and Costello, Tim. Global Village or Global Pillage:
Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
1998: A radical labor manifesto resisting globalizaton of capital.
Brosnan, Mark J. Technophobia: The Psychological Impact of Information
Technology. New York: Routledge, 1998: A survey of scholarly literature
on technophobia, with an emphasis on gender dimension of question.
Burke, James and Ornstein, Robert E. The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's
Capture and Control of our Minds and Culture. New York: Putnam, 1997:
A lay examination of the effect on technology on culture.
Burnett, Ron. "A Torn Page, Ghosts on the Computer Screen, Words, Images,
Labyrinths: Exploring the Frontiers of Cyberspace." In Marcus, George E.,
ed. Connected: Engagements with Media. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996: 67-98: An anthology of essays examining the pre-web sociology
of cyberspace and connectivity, circa 1995.
Cameron, Debra. Internet2: The Future of the Internet and Next-Generation
Initiatives. Charleston, SC: Computer Technology Research, 1999: A corporate
technical report on new developments in Internet protocols, primarily focusing
on Internet2 and its potential for increased bandwidth and faster service.
Case, Sue-Ellen. The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End
of Print Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996: An imaginative
study of how social and intellectual concepts such as "performance" and "lesbian"
are changing in an increasingly computer- and Internet-dominated world, with
its text organized to simulate surfing the Web.
Cetron, Marvin and Davies, Owen. Probable Tomorrows: How Science and
Technology Will Transform Our Lives in the Next Twenty Years. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1997: Futuristic look at positive effects of technology
in the first decades of the new millennium.
Coates, Joseph F.; Mahaffie, John B. and Hines, Andy. 2025: Scenarios
of U.S. and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology. Akron,
OH: Oakhill Press, 1996: A sweeping set of predictions about technological
change in the next 25 years.
Cochrane, Peter. Tips for Time Travelers. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1998: Reprint of brief and chatty Daily Telegraph columns on technological
topics of the moment.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. "From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and
Technology in American Life." In MacKenzie, Nancy R., ed. Science and Technology
Today: Readings for Writers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995: 247-260:
(No abstract given).
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. A Social History of American Technology.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997: Examination of how unique American
culture and geography influence technological advances.
Coyle, Diane. The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital
Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998: A reasoned analysis, between
the optimism of the technophiles and the pessimism of the Neo-Luddites, of
the economic and political effects of dematerialization.
Crandall, B.C., ed. Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global
Abundance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996: (No abstract available).
Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. New York: St. Martin's Press,
1998: Theoretical exploration of the "convergence" and the aesthetics of the
human-computer interface.
Cutcliffe, Stephen H.; Goldman, Steven L.; Medina, Manuel; and Sanmartin,
Jose, eds. New Worlds, New Technologies, New Issues. Bethlehem, PA:
Lehigh University Press, 1992: An anthology of presentations from a December
1989 conference in Valencia, Spain, to study the problems associated with
the cultural impact of technology transfers between societies.
Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Religion in the Information
Age. New York: Harmony Books, 1998: An exploration of the contemporary
connections between technology and mysticism.
Deibert, Ronald J. Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication
in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997:
Examines how communications media affect the world political order, favoring
interests of particular groups.
De Kerckhove, Derrick. The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New
Electronic Reality. Toronto: Somerville House, 1995: A speculative reflection
on media evolution by one of McLuhan's intellectual protégés.
De Lauretis, Teresa; Huyssen, Andreas and Woodward, Kathleen M., eds.
The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions. Madison, WI,
Coda Press, 1980: A collection of essays (circa 1977-1978) challenging the
artificial separation of technology from the imagination , arguing that the
technologization of everyday life in the 20th century has transformed all
cultural processes including communication, self-perception and identity,
and values.
Dewdney, Christopher. Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era.
Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998: McLuhanesque speculative work on the future
philosophical and biological effects of new technology.
Dibbell, Julian. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World.
New York: Henry Holt, 1998: A memoir describing Dibbell's several months as
a member of the MUD LambdaMOO and the conflicts between virtual reality and
real life, beginning with the widely reported 1993 "Mr. Bungle" affair and
ending with his decision to be less involved with the MUD because of real-life
concerns.
Dizard, Wilson P. The Coming Information Age: An Overview of Technology,
Economics, and Politics. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1982: An overview
of global developments in 1970s technology, concluding with a call for a more
coherent national communications and information policy.
Ernst, Martin L. Shaping the Nature of Future Literacy: A Synopsis.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Information Policy Research,
1996: An examination of nature of computer literacy.
Feenberg, Anderw. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge,
1999: A philosophical/theoretical examination of the power relationships between
technology and society; also proposes different ways of understanding technology
using concepts of Essentialism, Constructivism and Substantivism.
Gandy, Oscar H. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal
Information. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993: A study, steeped in both
contemporary social theory and a wide ample of commercial applications, of
the threat posed the computerization of personal data.
Garnham, Nicholas. "Constraints on Multimedia Convergence." In Dutton,
William H. and Peltu, Malcolm, eds. Information and Communication Technologies:
Visions and Realities. New York: Oxford University Press: 1996: 103-119:
A thoughtful study of how the coming of the Digital Age will and will not
result in media convergence.
Goswami, Dixie, and Howard, Tharon. "Preface." In Howard, Tharon and
Benson, Chris, eds. Electronic Networks: Crossing Boundaries, Creating
Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999: vii-xii: An anthology
of essays suggesting ways to incorporate computers, the Internet and other
forms of technology into school curriculum and arguing that students can benefit
from both learning about technology and using technology.
Grusky, Scott T. Silicon Sunset. Malibu, CA: InfoNet Press, 1998:
Digital fiction.
Hackerman, Norman and Ashworth, Kenneth. Conversations on the Uses
of Science and Technology. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press,
1996: A transcript of a series of conversations about the national practice
and policies of science with the former chair of the governing board of the
National Science Foundation.
Hakken. David. Cyborgs@Cyberspace: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future.
New York: Routledge, 1999: A rigorously ethnographic, mildly Leftist, study
of the social effects of computerization, questioning much of the popular
and non-empirical notions about cyberspace and the "computer revolution."
Hawisher, Gail E. and Selfe, Cynthia L., eds. Literacy, Technology,
and Society: Confronting the Issues. Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall,
1997: Textbook of readings for a "Technology and Society" course.
Heap, Nick, ed. Information Technology and Society: A Reader.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995: A coursebook of readings for an
Open University class in "Information Technology and Society."
Henderson, Harry. Issues in the Information Age. San Diego: Lucent
Books, 1999: Juvenile survey of issues related to information age.
Herring, Susan Davis. From the Titanic to the Challenger: An Annotated
Bibliography on Technological Failures of the Twentieth Century. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1989: Bibliography of books and articles on engineering-based
disasters from 1907 to 1986 (Challenger, Chernobyl and Ariane).
Hilligoss, Susan. "Getting Started in a Networked Writing Classroom:
Projects and Resources." In Howard, Tharon and Benson, Chris, eds. Electronic
Networks: Crossing Boundaries, Creating Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook,
1999: 1-21: An anthology of essays suggesting ways to incorporate computers,
the Internet and other forms of technology into school curriculum and arguing
that students can benefit from both learning about technology and using technology.
Hiltz, Starr Roxanne. The Virtual Classroom: Learning Without Limits
via Computer Networks. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993: A handbook on attempts
to use asynchronous "distance learning" to improve access to and effectiveness
of post-secondary education.
Hiltz, Starr Roxanne. Online Communities: A Case Study of the Office
of the Future. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984: NSF-funded study of computer
conferencing system in an office environment.
Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1983: Biography of Alan Turing.
Holderness, Mike. "Who Are the World's Information Poor?" In Loader,
Brian, ed. Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Policy in the Information
Society. New York: Routledge, 1998: 35-56: A leftist critique of technology's
effects on class and social divisions, as well as strategies of social inclusion.
Howard, Tharon and Perkins, Jane. "Hypermedia and the Future of Networked
Composition: Inter/Disciplining Our 'Selves'." In Howard, Tharon and Benson,
Chris, eds. Electronic Networks: Crossing Boundaries, Creating Communities.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999: 68-93: An anthology of essays suggesting
ways to incorporate computers, the Internet and other forms of technology
into school curriculum and arguing that students can benefit from both learning
about technology and using technology.
Hudson, Yeager. "Preface." In Hudson, Yeager, ed. Technology, Morality
and Social Policy. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998: vii-x:
An examination of the moral and philosophical consequences of technology.
Jones, Steven G. "Preface." In Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety:
Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1995: vii-ix: Computers and their effect on a new sense of community.
Katz, Jon. Media Rants: Postpolitics in the Digital Nation. San
Francisco: Hardwired, 1997: An anthology of opinionated and somewhat strident
media criticism columns from HotWired.
Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of
Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995:
An overview of the new science of complexity (and chaos), examining how spontaneous
order exists in nature, focusing on the interconnections among complexity
and the general laws that govern ecosystems, economic systems, and cultural
systems.
Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy V. Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the
Politics of Technology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997: A
theoretical examination, using a wealth of references from classical mythology,
of the politics of the relationship between technology and gender.
Kedzie, Christopher R. Communication and Democracy: Coincident Revolutions
and the Emergent Dictator's Dilemma. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1997: Using
the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European client states in the
late 1980s, the study asserts a positive correlation between open communications,
economic expansion and the growth of democracy.
Klapp, Orrin E. Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life
in the Information Age. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986: A sociological
study of the impact of information on the quality of everyday life, focusing
on the boredom effect of information overload.
Kling, Rob and C. Suzanne Iacono, C. Suzanne. "Computerization Movements
and the Mobilization of Support for Computerization." In Star, Susan Leigh,
ed. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995: 119-153: A leftist/activist
critique of the sociology of science.
Kling, Rob. "The Seductive Equation of Technological Progress with Social
Progress." In Kling, Rob, ed. Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts
and Social Choices. Second Edition. New York: Academic Press, 1996: 22-25:
An anthology exploring the ethical and moral issues related to computerization
of society.
Kohanski, Daniel. The Philosophical Programmer: Reflections on the
Moth in the Machine. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998: Philosophical
reflections on the essential nature, ethical considerations and social utility
of computers and computer programming.
Kubicek, Herbert and Dutton, William H. "The Social Shaping of Information
Superhighways: An Introduction." In Kubicek, Herbert; Dutton, William H. and
Williams, Robin, eds. The Social Shaping of Information Superhighways:
European and American Roads to the Information Society. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1997: 9-44: Policy analysis and comparison of European and
American approaches to information infrastructure, circa 1996.
Laudon, Kenneth C.; Traver, Carol Guercio and Laudon, Jane Price. Information
Technology and Society. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1994: A well-organized
and lavishly illustrated undergraduate teaching text addressing both the technical
and social issues related to information technology; includes an interactive
set of disks.
Levy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in a Digital Age. New
York: Plenum, 1998: Explores the concept of "virtualization," a
theoretical construct encompassing most forms of online computerization.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for
a Nuclear Age. New York: Basic Books, 1987: A collection of essays on
the meaning of the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear destruction, and the possibility
of triumph over evil and despair.
Lyon, David. The Information Society: Issues and Illusions. Cambridge,
MA: Polity Press, 1988: A study of the social shaping of technology by government,
military and commercial-industrial interests, as well as its global context,
and its cultural and ethical dimensions.
Malloy, Judy. "Electronic Storytelling the the 21st Century." In Pickover,
Clifford A., ed. Visions of the Future: Art, Technology, and Computing
in the 21st Century. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994: 137-144: An essay
on the future advent of the electronic book.
Manovich, Lev. "What is Digital Cinema?" In Lunenfield, Peter, ed. The
Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999: 172-197: An essay discussing the effect of computers on film making.
Marcus, Stephen. "Computers in Thinking, Writing, and Literature." In
Gerrard, Lisa., ed. Writing at Century's End: Essays on Computer-Aided
Composition. New York: Random House, 1987: 131-140: A collection of essays,
from a 1985 UCLA conference, on how word-processing is changing both writing
and the teaching of writing.
Markham, Annette N. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual
Space. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998: A self-reflective and somewhat
personalized narrative exploring the ethnography of online communication (mostly
MOOs and MUDs), focusing on questions of identity and the tension between
the reality of the physical world versus the reality of the online world.
Markoff, John. "Operator? Give Me the World Wide Web and Make It Snappy."
New York Times, 6 October 1998: C1-2: Use of new voice recognition
software to connect to the Web.
Marx, Leo. "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?" In Goldberg, Steven
E. and Strain, Charles R., eds. Technological Change and the Transformation
of America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987: 23-36:
A seminal essay on the two contrasting notions of progress, Enlightenment
and technocratic, and how they relate to technological advancement (1987 invited
paper added to the proceedings of a conference, "The Human Side of High Tech,"
at DePaul University in November 1984).
Marx, Leo. "The Idea of 'Technology' and Postmodern Pessimism." In Smith,
Merrit Roe and Marx, Leo, eds. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma
of Technological Determinism. Boston: MIT Press, 1994: 237-257: An essay
arguing that Postmodernist pessimism about technology that arose n the 1970s
can in part be explained by its increasing abstraction.
McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. War and Peace in the Global
Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could
be Eliminated by More Feedforward. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968: A nonlinear,
impressionistic explication on how media evolution has interacted with the
evolution of warfare, with comparisons to the text of James Joyce's Finnegan's
Wake.
Molina, Alfonso Hernán. The Social Basis of the Microelectronics
Revolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989: A study of the
social forces of the military-industrial complex that shaped the advent of
"microtechnology" (defined as semiconductors, computers, automatic
controls and telecommunications) since World War II. Consciously not a study
of technologys social impact.
Mosco, Vincent. Will Geography End with Computer Communication? The
Impact of Computer Communication on Distance, Time, and Location. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy, 1994: The
book examines influence of computer communication on geography, specifically
topics such as business location.
Moulthrop, Stuart. "Getting Over the Edge." In Strate, Lance; Jacobson,
Ronald L. and Gibson, Stephanie B., eds. Communication and Cyberspace:
Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton
Press, 1996: 233-241: A Postmodern study of "new edge" technologies and their
effects, emphasizing the contradictions of print-based discourse in an electronic
age.
Mulgan, Geoff J. Communication and Control: Networks and the New Economics
of Communication. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991: A thoughtful study
of the centrality of the concept of control in a networked G7 world (circa
1970-1990), with a emphasis on economic accountability and governmental policy.
Naisbitt, John. Global Paradox: The Bigger the World Economy, The
More Powerful Its Smallest Players. New York: W. Morrow, 1994: Posits
a global trend toward greater economic integration and political independence.
Neuman, W. Russell; Just, Marion R. and Crigler, Ann N. Common Knowledge:
News and the Construction of Political Meaning. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992: A thoughtful study of the recent history of telecommunications
policy and regulation within the framework of the ongoing network-based, digitally
drive communications revolution. Argues for Open Communications Infrastructure
(OCI).
Norman, Donald A. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail,
the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998: A study that argues that the personal computer
should be quiet and unobtrusive, but today it is demanding and controlling
because the computer industry is trapped in a cycle of inventing new and more
complicated technology. Argues for an "invisible computer" which is unobtrusive.
Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994: A study, by a student of Leo Marx, of the unifying social and
symbolic role of the technological sublime in American history since the early
19th century.
Nye, David E. Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction
of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997: An examination
of the roles of technology and narrative in 20th Century American history,
arguing that people shape their space with technology as opposed to having
their space shaped by machines and that the impact on technology depends on
whether or not people develop a narrative to explain the new technology.
Ogden, Frank. Navigating in Cyberspace: A Guide to the Next Millennium.
Toronto: MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1995: A popular book proselytizing
for technological change in the context of self-help.
Olesky, Walter. Entertainment. New York: Facts On File, 1996:
A pre-Web work for juveniles about advances in technology and the effects
on entertainment, containing descriptions of now-commonplace advances in television,
radio, home computers and entertainment.
Pepperell, Robert. The Post-Human Condition. Oxford, UK: Intellect,
1995: Examines the presumptive impact of technology on art, creativity, and
philosophy, suggesting that traditional distinctions between the natural and
the artificial, as well as order and disorder, are becoming redundant.
Perkinson, Henry J. No Safety in Numbers: How the Computer Quantified
Everything and Made People Risk-aversive. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press,
Inc. 1996: A Structuralist study, circa 1996, of the computer's cultural effects.
Core argument is that the computer allows us to analyze our lives in mathematical
and scientific ways, but also causes us to see risk and therefore be more
risk-aversive.
Plunkett, John and Rossetto, Louis. Mind Grenades: Manifestos from
the Future. San Francisco: HardWired, 1996: A collection of dazzlingly
Postmodernist poster-like graphics, often inexplicable in their intent but
always visually interesting, used as an introductory device for each issue
of the magazine.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the
Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985: Specifically criticizing
the medium of television, Postman examines mass media's effect on public discourse.
His criticism stems from the idea that entertainment is something that society
craves, and that our cravings for it may lead to our own Huxlean demise. He
stresses that with the introduction of each new form of media, new forms of
thought and discourse are introduced.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
New York: Vintage Books, 1992: The unforeseen costs of technology.
Postman, Neil. "Virtual Students, Digital Classroom." In Henderson, Bill,
ed. Minutes of the the [sic] Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the
Electronic Revolution. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1996: 197-215: Impact
of technology and info overload.
Provenzo, Eugene F. Jr. Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy: Microcomputers
and the Emergence of Post-Typographic Culture. New York: Teachers College
Press, 1986: A brief study, circa 1986, comparing McLuhan's notions of the
Typographic Age with the "post-typographic" advent of computers, emphasizing
the "telematics" of remote data access and possible effect on scholarship,
education, and politics.
Rickly, Rebecca J. "Making Technology Count: Incentives, Rewards, and
Evaluations." In Howard, Tharon and Benson, Chris, eds. Electronic Networks:
Crossing Boundaries, Creating Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook,
1999: 225-239: An anthology of essays suggesting ways to incorporate computers,
the Internet and other forms of technology into school curriculum and arguing
that students can benefit from both learning about technology and using technology.
Rosen, Bernard Carl. Winners and Losers of the Information Revolution:
Psychosocial Change and Its Discontents. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998:
A sociological study of the social costs of the "techno-service economy,"
focusing on the emergence of a New Elite class and arguing that the complex
transformation happened so rapidly that it has resulted in individual anxiety
and tension between economic winners and losers.
Schroeder, Ralph. Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamic of Virtual Reality
Technology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc. 1996: A study challenging
the antirealist view of technology, arguing that the social implications of
new technology depends upon the spread of "instrumental rationality" throughout
society. VR has evolved into an everyday tool but has not yet replaced other
tools. Also examines how social forces shaped VR technology and how VR technology
has shaped society, but notes that VR technology has had little impact on
society at large.
Segal, Howard P. Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology
in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994: A collection
of case studies (museums, cars, etc., as well as literature, e.g. Bellamy,
Tocqueville, Vonnegut, Mumford) examining the mixed results of technological
advancement.
Star, Susan Leigh. "Introduction." In Star, Susan Leigh, ed. The Cultures
of Computing. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995: 1-28: An anthology
of feminist/leftist/activist critiques of the computing culture in general
and pre-Web cyberspace in particular, focusing on the "community of practice"
surrounding the use of computers in a social and cultural context.
Star, Susan Leigh, ed. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in
Science and Technology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995:
A leftist/activist critique of the sociology of science.
Stunkel, Kenneth R. and Sarsar, Saliba. Ideology, Values, and Technology
in Political Life. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994: A study
of the ideological dimension of technology.
Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American
Society in the 20th Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984: Magnum opus
on the cultural forces which have shaped late-19- and 20-century American
history.
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: Bantan Books, 1981:
A broad-stroke and quite prescient (c. 1980) survey of three major technological
revolutions in human history--the agricultural, industrial, and information
revolution--illustrating changes in human life that came with each revolution
with a heavy emphasis on politics.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984: An influential pre-Internet examination
of the effect of computers on human psychology, society and social interaction,
arguing that the computers change the way we think about ourselves and about
the world around us.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995: An examination of the role computers
and the Internet have in determining how we think about ourselves and in creating
new social and cultural sensibility. Argues that people now look to the computer
as an intimate machine making possible numerous identities online and that
this affects one's real-life ways of thinking about one's identity.
Weil, Michelle M. and Rosen, Larry D. TechnoStress: Coping with Technology
@Work @Home @Play. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997: A self-help
manual to help cope with technology-induced stresses.
Weinstein, Matthew. Robot World: Education, Popular Culture and Science.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998: A Postmodern study arguing that popular
culture is changing the way that science and education are perceived, using
the Robot World theme park as an example. He believes that popular culture
has opened up the field of science to new participants and that education
will continued to be commercialized.
Wilson, Richard Guy; Pilgrim, Dianne H. and Tashjian, Dickram, eds. The
Machine Age in America. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986: A celebration
of the rise of modernity in industrial design in the 1900-1940 period.
Wise, McGregor J. Exploring Technology and Social Space. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997: The book examines, from a highly theoretical
and philosophical perspective, the cultural shift in popular notions about
technology.
Wresch, William. Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information
Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996: The book examines
the gulf between the information rich and information poor in Windhoek, Namibia,
arguing that it is not merely a matter of technology but also of incredible
social and cultural disparities.
II. Cyberculture and human-technology interface (1990-1995)
The Internet and the Web have spawned their own online culture, also known
as Cyberculture, which includes cyberpunk and cybernetics. This section comprises
works which explore the social scene that exists online and what this means
about humanitys relationship to technology. The literature for this
section is primarily from 1990 to 1995.
Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999: A technical history of the Internet from a military computer network
in the 1960s to its mass use and multiple functions today, focusing on how
the desires and beliefsof those involved in creating the Internet helped shape
the technical standards which define it and how the Internet's flexibility
allowed it to survive and grow over the years.
Apter, Emily. Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual
Subjects Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1999: A Postmodernist
examination of colonialism and Francophony with glancing references to the
implications for cyberspace.
Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1981: A philosophical argument for the uses of mysticism
as an antidote to the problems of rationalist technology-based society.
Brockman, John. Digiterati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite. San
Francisco: HardWired, 1996: Interviews with three dozen prominent figures
of the Net world in 1995 and late 1996.
Calcutt, Andrew. White Noise: An A-Z of Contradictions in Cyberculture.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999: An insightful, widely sourced study of
cyberculture that rejects the "techno-determinist" outlook and discusses the
Internet as a reflection of society as a whole, giving special emphasis to
the contradictions inherent both in traditional society and in cyberspace.
Connors, Michael. The Race to the Intelligent State: Towards the Global
Information Economy of 2005. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993:
An accessible comparative study of national "infostructures" and the emerging
global information economy.
Davis, Philip J. and Hersh, Reuben. Descartes' Dream: The World According
to Mathematics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986: A reflection on the central
role of mathematics in the rise of the modern world, with some emphasis on
the ways in which the computer has altered the quantitative dimensions of
contemporary life.
Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
New York: Grove Press, 1996: Mostly on the basis of studying collective fantasies,
the books explores both pop culture, in general, and marginal cybercultures,
in particular, for evidence often traced back to transgressive 1960s sensibilities,
of new forms of music, robotics, bodily performance art, cybersex, and morphing.
Doheny-Farina, Stephen. The Wired Neighborhood. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1996: A study which debunks many of the utopian
myths about the net, examining the relationship between on-line communities
and geo-physical communities, finally offering some hope that one can aid
the other.
Gelernter, David. The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry
of Human Thought. New York: Free Press, 1994: A philosophical examination
of the link between the processes of human thought and the workings of the
computer.
Gigliotti, Carol. "The Ethical Life of the Digital Aesthetic." In Lunenfield,
Peter, ed. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999: 24-45: An essay examining aesthetics and ethics on the
Internet using pornography and virtual art museums as examples.
Grossman, Wendy M., ed. Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal
Computer World. New York: Springer Verlag, 1997: A collection, from Personal
Computer World magazine in England, of pre-web interviews with computer
industry leaders, focusing on the technical history of their products and
research, as well as computer crime.
Hafner, Katie and John Markoff. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on
the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991: An early-1990s
account of Americans' fear of the computerization of society through the narratives
of three famous Internet hackers of the 1980s, Kevin Mitnick, Pengo and Robert
Morris.
Hafner, Katie. "The Epic Saga of The Well." Wired, May 1997: 100-142:
(no abstract).
Heim, Michael. "The Nerd in the Noosphere." Computer-Mediated Communication
2:1 (1 January 1995): 3; URL: <http://sunsite.unc.edu/cmc/mag/1995/jan/heim.html>:
The book questions the value of online communication to create a community.
Heim, Michael. "The Cyberspace Dialectic." In Lunenfield, Peter, ed.
The Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999: 24-45: An essay suggesting that the important dialectic of cyberspace
is one between naïve realists and network idealists, and instead argues
for "virtual realism."
Hiltz, Starr Roxanne and Turoff, Murray. The Network Nation: Human
Communications via Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993: A magnum
opus with the status of the definitive work on the nature of computer-assisted
communication in conference form.
Jones, Steven G. "The Internet and Its Social Landscape." In Jones, Steven
G., ed. Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997: 7-35: Examines the nature of social
and civic life online, with emphasis on social outcomes.
Jones, Steven G. "Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues." In Jones,
Steven G., ed. Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for
Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998/1999: 1-27:
Anthology of quantitative and qualitative monographs addressing current methods
of Internet research.
Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and
the Internet. New York: Routledge, 1999: A narrative history of virtual
culture, emphasizing the nature of power on cyberspace and in virtual communities.
Also says power can be viewed as a possession (Weber), social order (Barry
Barnes), or domination (Foucault).
Keegan, Paul. "The Digiterati!" New York Times Magazine, 21 May
1995: 38-43: Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe...first issue January 1993; Conde
Nast paid $3.5 million in late 1994 for minority interest.
King, John Leslie; Ginter, Rebecca E.; and Pickering, Jeanne M. "The
Rise and Fall of Netville: The Saga of Cyberspace Construction Boomtown in
the Great Divide." In Kiesler, Sara, ed. Culture of the Internet. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997: 3-33: A cultural history of early engineering
and defense-based origins of the Internet.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. "The Electronic Vernacular." In Marcus,
George E., ed. Connected: Engagements with Media. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996: 21-65: An anthology of essays examining the pre-web
sociology of cyberspace and connectivity, circa 1995.
Kroker, Arthur. "Virtual Capitalism." In Aronowitz, Stanley; Martinsons,
Barbara and Menser, Michael, eds. Technoscience and Cyberculture: A Cultural
Study. New York, Routledge, 1996: 167-179: An anthology of cultural studies
essays on the interdisciplinary study of science and technology (from 1994
CUNY conference).
Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankinds Emerging World
in Cyberspace. New York: Plenum, 1997: A postmodern and theoretical exploration
of the idea of collective and communitarian thought made possible in cyberspace.
Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995: A thoughtful comparison of the development
and structures of virtual communities on the Pre-Web Internet with the evolution
to actual cities in history.
Reid, Elizabeth. "Virtual Worlds: Culture and Imagination."
In Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication
and Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995: 164-193: How
being online can affect behavior.
Rheingold, Howard. "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community." In Harasim,
Linda M., ed. Global Networks: Computers and International Communication.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993: 57-80: An entry-level anthology of pre-Web
aspects of the Internet, focusing on issues of community (Well) and social
interaction, property rights, culture, distance or CMC education, conferencing
and discussion groups, and national policy.
Ross, Andrew. "Earth to Gore, Earth to Gore." In Aronowitz, Stanley;
Martinsons, Barbara and Menser, Michael, eds. Technoscience and Cyberculture:
A Cultural Study. New York, Routledge, 1996: 109-121: An anthology of
cultural studies essays on the interdisciplinary study of science and technology
(from 1994 CUNY conference).
Rushkoff, Douglas. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace.
San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994: A narrative explicating the transgressive
connection between drugs and cyberspace, and the proposed indeterminacy of
physical reality.
Schumacher, E.F. Good Work. New York: Harper & Row, 1979:
A further elaboration of Schumachers ideas about human-scale technology,
particularly as they might help the Third World.
Seabrook, John. Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace. New
York: Simon & Schuster. 1997: A two-year exploration of chat rooms, email,
and virtual experiences determines there is no replacement for true human
contact and conversation.
Sirius, R.U. "It's Better To Be Inspired Than Wired: An Interview with
R.U. Sirius." In Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise, eds. Digital Delirium.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997: 16-24: Essential ambiguity of proponents
of cyberculture.
Smith, Anthony. Software for the Self: Technology and Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996: Literate reflections on the historical
and cultural consequences of technology.
Sterling, Bruce. "Unstable Networks." In Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise,
eds. Digital Delirium. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997: 25-37: Anarchic
and adolescent nature of people drawn to computers.
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the
Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995: A largely
personalized and lyrical narrative examining how, as computers and cyberspace
become increasingly important, they are changing our social norms and modes
of interaction, particularly how we think of ourselves and the way we relate
to other people. Some people now interact more through computers than person-to-person
and, as a result, the persona they hold online represents who they really
are.
Loader, Brian. "The Governance of Cyberspace: Politics, Technology, and
Global Restructuring." In Loader, Brian, ed. The Governance of Cyberspace:
Politics, Technology, and Global Restructuring. New York: Routledge, 1997:
1-19: A study exploring the issues related to the organizing and governing
of cyberspace.
In Vitanza, Victor J., ed. CyberReader. Boston: Allyn and Bacon,
1999: a selection of readings.
III. Web technology and community (post-1995)
The Web has given rise to its own online culture. This section covers works
exploring the social scene that exists online since 1995 and what this means
about humanitys relationship to technology. The section also includes
information on Web technology since 1995.
Berners-Lee, Tim. "Realizing the Potential of the Web." In Lloyd, Peter
and Boyle, Paula, eds. Web-Weaving: Intranets, Extranets, and Strategic
Alliances. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998: 283-292: A manual, with
case studies, for firms that want to establish and maintain corporate Intranets.
Browne, Ray B. "The Vanishing Global Village." In Browne, Ray B. and
Fishwick, Marshall W., eds. The Global Village: Dead or Alive? Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999: 24-35: An anthology
examining the state of the McLuhan's global village, "sailing under the flag
of low expectations." (Browne, "Introduction," p. 11).
Collins, Harry and Pinch, Trevor. The Golem at Large: What You Should
Know About Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998: A case-study-based
exploration of technology, viewed as a golem (a Jewish mythological creature)
and as a product of social life. Sequel to The Golem: What You Should Know
About Science, 1993.
Dixon, Joan Broadhurst and Cassidy, Eric J., eds. Virtual Futures:
Cyberotics, Technology, and Post-Human Pragmatism. New York: Routledge,
1998: A good example of Postmodern essays speculating on cyberotics, cyberfeminism
and "post-human" possibilities, mostly the result of series of "Virtual Futures"
conferences at the University of Warwick.
Dyson, Esther. Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.
New York: Broadway Books, 1997: A somewhat Pollyana-ish and curiously autobiographical
guide for the very uninitiated to the Net's potential effects on community,
work, education, commerce, censorship, privacy, and security.
Ebo, Bosah. "Internet or Outernet?" In Ebo, Bosah, ed. Cyberghetto
or Cybertopia? Race, Class, and Gender on the Internet. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1998: 1-12: How the online world can create an ideal environment
because information and communication will positively effect social structures,
gender roles, and class systems. It also explores the negative repercussions
including the alienation of the poor and uneducated who are automatic outcasts
to the virtual world.
Ender, Morton G. and David R. Segal, "Cyber-Soldiering: Race, Class,
Gender and New Media Use in the U.S. Army," in Bosah Ebo, ed., Cyberghetto
or Cybertopia? Race, Class, and Gender on the Internet. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1998. 67: (no abstract).
Estabrook, Noel and Vernon, Bill. Teach Yourself the Internet in 24 Hours.
Indianapolis, IN: Sams Net, 1997: Self-help guide for novices want to go online.
Fuller, Steve. "Why Even Scholars Don't Get a Free Lunch in Cyberspace."
In Loader, Brian, ed. Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Policy in
the Information Society. New York: Routledge, 1998: 123-145: leftist critique
of over-valuing technology's gifts.
Gilster, Paul. Digital Literacy. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 1997: A celebratory lay guide to navigating the Internet for the uninitiated,
emphasizing the translation of techno-jargon into the accessible language.
Heim, Michael. Virtual Realism. New York: Oxford University Press,
1998: A narrative meditation on the aesthetics of the merger of the computers
and the human spirit.
Henderson, Harry. The Internet. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1998:
overview book about the Internet for juveniles.
Horn, Stacy. Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online
Town. New York: Warner Books, 1998: A personal description of the founding
and operation of a virtual community in New York City.
Jones, Steven G. "Information, Internet, and Community: Notes toward
an Understanding of Community in the Information Age." In Jones, Steven G.,
ed. Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998: 1-34: Hopefulness about the benefits
of new kinds of communities online.
Levine, Deb. The Joy of Cybersex: A Guide for Creative Lovers.
New York: Ballantine, 1998: Very specific hands-on advice on subjects from
the mildest kind of flirting, to picking an online dating service, to "exploring
your sexual self."
McNutt, John G. "Insuring Social Justice for the New Underclass: Community
Interventions to Meet the Needs of the New Poor." In Ebo, Bosah, ed. Cyberghetto
or Cybertopia? Race, Class, and Gender on the Internet. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1998: 33-47: How the online world can create an ideal environment
because information and communication will positively effect social structures,
gender roles, and class systems. It also explores the negative repercussions
including the alienation of the poor and uneducated who are automatic outcasts
to the virtual world.
Mead, Rebecca. "Talk of the Town: Nerdfile." New Yorker, 21 December
1998: 33-34: A web-based 70th birthday celebration for Noam Chomsky, linguist
and social critic.
Morse, Margaret. Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998: A Postmodernist exploration of
television and media art.
Noll, Michael. Highway of Dreams: A Critical View along the Information
Superhighway. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997: A personalized
and somewhat contrarian view of the future potential of the information superhighway
and the possibilities of the World Wide Web.
Platt, Charles. Anarchy Online. New York: HarperPrism, 1997: A
libertarian narrative about both hackers ("netcrime") and pornography ("netsex")
on the Net.
Skriloff, Lisa and Gould, Jodie. Men Are from Cyberspace: The Single
Woman's Guide to Flirting, Dating, and Finding Love On-Line. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1997: A chatty advice on how to get dates on/from the
Internet...sort of an online version of The Rules.
Smith, Marc A. and Kollock, Peter. "Communities in Cyberspace." In Smith,
Marc A. and Kollock, Peter, eds. Communities in Cyberspace. New York:
Routledge, 1999: 3-25: A collection of sociological studies of the nature
of identity and community on the Net, circa 1997.
Stanek, William R. Learn the Internet in a Weekend. Rocklin, CA:
Prima Publishing, 1998: A self-instruction book for Web users.
Surratt, Carla G. Netlife: Internet Citizens and Their Communities.
Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1998: Examines if online communication is "real,"
which author defines as meaningful to participants as face-to-face communication.
Focuses on Internet Relay Char (IRC), Usenet and Fidonet because they are
multi-user, two-way, publicly accessible and not fantasy based. Concludes
that it is real.
Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents.
San Francisco: City Lights, 1997: A revealing autobiography of a mid-40s
female software engineer, focusing on issues of sociosexual mores of the computer
industry, personal growth and network control during the early commercialization
of the Internet.
Winters, Paul A., ed. The Information Revolution: Opposing Viewpoints.
San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998: Sets of opposing views on a number of Internet
issues.
Witchel, Alex. "Singles Look for Romance at the Soup Kitchen." New
York Times, 7 December 1998: B8: singles service call Single Volunteers
that uses socially-conscious good works as a venue for meeting does not have
a phone, but instead relies on the Web.
"In Dow Jones's Locker." The Economist, 24 October 1998: 73: (no
abstract or author listed).
IV. General cyberspace, web use, Internet theory
This section includes works which examine the basics of the Internet use
and Internet theory. It gives readers general information on cyberspace and
how Americans are using the Web.
Auletta, Ken. "The Last Sure Thing," New Yorker, 9 November 1998:
40-47: (no abstract).
Bronner, Ethan. "Think Tank: A Ticking Bomb on the Web." New York
Times, 31 October 1998: A21: Effect of Avner Cohen, author of Israel
and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 1998) posting extensive formerly
classified primary source materials on the web.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York, Ace Books, 1984: Seminal
digital fiction with the first use of the word "cyberspace."
Greenstein, Jennifer. "How Many? How Much? Who Knows?" Brill's Content,
November 1998: 54-6, 58: From the most recent data available for 1998, perhaps
as many as 65 million American adults are currently online, which means that
the proportion of the adult population using the Web has probably passed 33
percent. (abstract and only quote are same).
Hoffman, Paul. Destination Internet and World Wide Web. Foster
City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, 1995: An entry-level guide on Internet circa
1994-95.
Kolb, David. "Discourse Across Links." In Ess, Charles, ed. Philosophical
Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1996: 15-26: A theoretical examination of the kinds of
discourse that computer-mediated communication encourages and discourages.
Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise. "Introduction: Digital Delirium."
In Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise, eds. Digital Delirium. New
York: St. Martins Press, 1997: ix-xvii: An anthology of essays "written
like a jazz album," many based on ruminations originating on the CTHEORY
(culture theory) listserv, suggesting the possibility of a brave new world
for creativity online, the mixed blessing of the Internet and a "manifesto
against the right-wing politics of cyberlibertarianism."
Napoli, Lisa. "The Post-Lewinsky Winner Is the Web." New York Times,
28 September 1998: C7: Conclusion to be drawn about Web from the national
Lewinsky experience in August and September 1998.
Porter, David. "Introduction." In Porter, David, ed. Internet Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1997: xi-xviii: Good 1997 explication of pre-Web communication.
Rational postmodernist rendering of new models of "place" made possible by
the Internet, including virtual communities, virtual bodies, language &
rhetoric and Net politics. A good example of the pre-Web scholarly interest
in sociology of Net culture.
Royant, Olivier, Deputy Editor. Paris Match. Interview by author, 29
July 1998, Paris. Tape recording: For most of Western Europe, less than two
percent of the adult population is online.
Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic
Frontier. New York: Bantam Books, 1992: The story of hacker culture in
the late 1980s and of the successful law enforcement efforts to prosecute
hackers culminating in crackdowns in 1990.
Stone, Alan. How America Got On-Line: Politics, Markets, and the Revolution
in Telecommunications. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997: A history of the
interplay between private firms and government in telecommunications.
Teicholz, Nina. "Women Want It All, and It's All on Line." New York
Times, 22 October 1998: G10: Approximately 45 percent of the people online
in late 1998 are women.
V. Technology (SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EFFECTS)
How does changing technology affect how humans behave and interact with each
other? How does it make our lives more global? What does this mean about politics?
Baudrillard, Jean. "Global Debt and Parallel Universe." In Kroker, Arthur
and Kroker, Marilouise, eds. Digital Delirium. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1997: 38-40: A postmodern discourse on information overload comparing
the expanding quantity of information to debt.
Bianculli, David. Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1992/1994: A spirited and well-argued defense
of television, written in 1991.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic
Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994: A lyrical meditation on the nature
of reading and how it might change as we move from a print to an electronic
culture.
Birkerts, Sven. "The Fate of the Book." In Birkerts, Sven, ed. Tolstoy's
Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996:
189-199: An anthology of essays addressing the role of technology in the literary
arts. The book is an expansion of ideas visited in Birkerts' The Gutenberg
Elegies, in which the author argued that the sudden appearance of the
computer was changing everything about the way we lived, and not necessarily
for the better.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the
History of Writing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991: A thoughtful
pre-Web discussion of the late age of print and dawn of the age of electronic
writing.
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding
New Media. Boston: M.I.T, Press, 1998: A thoughtful theoretical treatise
on the inherent qualities of new media (particularly in the realm of the visual),
with an emphasis on ways in which it has been shaped by and hence reflects
previous media forms.
Boyle, James. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction
of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996:
An examination of how property rights should be changed in the emerging Information
Society to move away from the paradigm that privileges authorship.
Brose, Eric Dorn. Technology and Science in the Industrializing Nations,
1500-1914. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1998: A compact and
summarizing synthesis deliberately weaving together four centuries (1500-1900)
of the histories of science, technology and economic development.
Bumiller, Elisabeth. "Personal Take on Walking in Clinton's Shoes." New
York Times, 17 October 1998: A17, 19: (no abstract).
Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences
from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995: A pre-Web (1994 Rosenbach Lectures at the University Of Pennsylvania)
collection of critical theory (albeit seeking "historical comprehension")
essays on the history of writing and readings, with emphasis on how the coming
electronic revolution will be similar to the roll-to-codex transformation.
Couch, Carl J. Information Technologies and Social Orders. New
York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996: (no abstract).
Childers, Erskine B. "Whose Whispers Are in the Gallery?" In Gerbner,
George; Mowlana, Hamid I. and Schiller, Herbert I, eds. Invisible Crises:
What Conglomerate Control of Media Means for America and the World. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1996: An anthology of leftist essays on the corporatization,
and subsequent monopolization, of communication and its unwanted global and
domestic effects.
De Kerckhove, Derrick. The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New
Electronic Reality. Toronto: Somerville House, 1995: A speculative reflection
on media evolution by one of McLuhan's intellectual protégés.
Dizard, Wilson Jr. Old Media, New Media: Mass Communications in the
Information Age. New York: Longman, 1994: A pre-Web study of the evolution
of the mass entertainment and information sector with an emphasis on the history
of the development of the current mix of old media and new media.
Escobar, Arturo. "Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture."
In Sardar, Ziauddin and Ravetz, Jerome R., eds. Cyberfutures: Culture and
Politics on the Information Superhighway. New York: New York University
Press, 1996: 111-137: An anthology of essays questioning the faith that cybertechnologies
will enhance our quality of life.
Finnegan, Ruth. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of
Communication. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1988: A collection
of anthropological essays (circa 1969-1884) focusing on the interaction between
orality and literacy, often examining Third World cultures.
Franzen, Jonathan. "Scavenging." In Birkerts, Sven, ed. Tolstoy's
Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996:
3-15: An anthology of essays addressing the role of technology in the literary
arts. The book is an expansion of ideas visited in Birkerts' The Gutenberg
Elegies, in which the author argued that the sudden appearance of the
computer was changing everything about the way we lived, and not necessarily
for the better.
Frick, Thomas. "Either/Or." In Birkerts, Sven, ed. Tolstoy's Dictaphone:
Technology and the Muse. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996: 200-215:
An anthology of essays addressing the role of technology in the literary arts.
The book is an expansion of ideas visited in Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies,
in which the author argued that the sudden appearance of the computer was
changing everything about the way we lived, and not necessarily for the better.
Graff, Harvey J. The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past
and Present. Revised Edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1995: A seminal work of "literacy studies," focusing on the history of the
study of literary with much emphasis on literary as an aspect of power relationships
and control.
Greenbaum, Joan. "From Chaplin to Dilbert: The Origins of computer Concepts."
In Aronowitz, Stanley and Cutler, Jonathan, eds. Post-Work: The Wages of
Cybernation. New York: Routledge, 1998: From Booklist , January 1, 1998,
"Where labor history and critical analysis of economic trends circulate, this
interdisciplinary collection of essays (some original, others first presented
at a conference sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studieswhich sociologist
Aronowitz headsat the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York) should find interested readers. Convinced that the labor movement's
abandonment of shorter working hours as a goal laid the groundwork for the
travails of our current globalized, downsized, outsourced workplaces, the
authors discuss poverty, welfare policy, the recurring notion of a guaranteed
income, "Why There Is No Movement of the Poor," the education-to-work controversy,
attacks on the university tenure system, complex effects of computers on the
positions of white-collar workers, and the difficulty of incorporating cultural
concerns, including leisure time and other quality-of-life issues, into the
dominant, rabidly free-market discourse of political economy. A demanding
book but full of useful insights." Mary Carroll 1998, American Library Association.
Grey, Victor. Web Without a Weaver: How the Internet Is Shaping our
Future. Concord, CA: Open Heart Press, 1997: A layperson's introductory
exploration of the possible social meanings of the Internet.
Hall, David D. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996: A history of the rise of
book culture in 17th- and 18th-Century America.
Harris, Michael H. and Hannah, Stan A. Into the Future: The Foundations
of Library and Information Services in the Post-Industrial Era. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex, 1993: A scholarly study, using Daniel Bell's Postindustrial model
as a starting point, of how electronic communication might change the role
and purpose of libraries.
Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality
and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1986: The definitive study of the "crisis" in human communication when
Greek orality transformed itself into Greek literacy.
Havelock, Eric. "The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern
Mind." In Olson, David R. and Torrance, Nancy, eds. Literacy and Orality.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 11-27: The proceedings of a June
1987 conference on orality and literacy at the University of Toronto.
Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993: A narrative study of both the negative aspects of
virtual reality, which is defined as an outgrowth of digital reality.
Hindman, Sandra. "Introduction." In Hindman, Sandra, ed. Printing
the Written Word: The Social History of Books, Circa 1450-1520. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991: 1-18: An anthology of analytical bibliography
and histoire du livre scholarship on the history of first fifty years
of printing, focusing printers, authors, artists, and readers...from a 1987
conference, "From Scribal Culture to Print Culture."
Howard, Gerald. "Slouching Towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of
Publicity." In Birkerts, Sven, ed. Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and
the Muse. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996: 16-27: An anthology of essays
addressing the role of technology in the literary arts. The book is an expansion
of ideas visited in Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, in which the author
argued that the sudden appearance of the computer was changing everything
about the way we lived, and not necessarily for the better.
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the
Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998: An examination of
the early modern origins of print culture, with an emphasis on the fact that
little of what we assume makes a printed book credible was indeed applicable
up to the 18th Century.
Kaufer, David S. and Carley, Kathleen M. Communication at a Distance:
The Influence of Print on Sociocultural Organization and Change. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993: A thoughtful and rigorous study examining
orality, writing and print to argue that new media, rather than replacing
old media (dominance theory), instead provide additional possibilities for
users of older media. Research focuses is on the larger sociocultural contexts
of print communication, with an emphasis on historical influences of print.
Koch, Tom. The News as Myth: Fact and Context in Journalism. New
York: Greenwood Press, 1990: A thoughtful exploration of news as a social
construct.
Koch, Tom. The Message Is the Medium: Online All the Time for Everyone.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996: An idiosyncratic and vaguely contrarian how-to
explication of the pre-Netscape online world (c. 1995).
Kress, Gunther. "Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically
Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text." In Snyder, Ilana,
ed. Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. New York:
Routledge, 1998: 53-79: An essay contrasting the visual and verbal.
Lacy, Dan M. From Grunts to Gigabytes: Communications and Society.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996: An accessibly summarizing lay
history of (pre-Web) communications, emphasizing the effect of evolving technology.
Levinson, Paul. The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the
Information Revolution. New York: Routledge, 1997: An interpretive and
mildly deterministic history of the development and consequences of communications
technologies.
Lombreglia, Ralph." Humanity's Humanity in the Digital Twenty-First."
In Birkerts, Sven, ed. Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse.
St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996: 231-246: An anthology of essays addressing
the role of technology in the literary arts. The book is an expansion of ideas
visited in Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, in which the author argued
that the sudden appearance of the computer was changing everything about the
way we lived, and not necessarily for the better.
Mann, Jim. Tomorrow's Global Community: How the Information Deluge
Is Transforming Business and Government. Philadelphia: BainBridgeBooks,
1998: A mildly eccentric but polymathic survey of the global dimensions of
information overload and speculations about its future effects on economic
and governmental activities.
Marc, David. Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and
Long-Term Memory Loss. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995:
A collection of idiosyncratic and polemical essays on the decline of the humanities
under the influence of television-directed mass culture.
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric
Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988: An imaginative and ground-breaking social history of the early
electric media (telephone and electric light).
Mathias, Paul. La Cité Internet. Paris, France: Presses
de Sciences Po, 1997: Untranslatable.
Morris, Paul J. and Tchudi, Stephen. The New Literacy: Moving Beyond
the 3 Rs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996: A study of contemporary literacy,
just before advent of the Web.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995: An
edited version of the 18 articles he wrote for Wired about "being digital."
Negroponte's text is mostly a history of media technology rather than a set
of predictions for future technologies. In the beginning, he describes the
evolution of CD-ROMs, multimedia, hypermedia, HDTV (high-definition television),
and more. The section on interfaces is informative, offering an up-to-date
history on visual interfaces, graphics, virtual reality (VR), holograms, teleconferencing
hardware, the mouse and touch-sensitive interfaces, and speech recognition.
Neuman, W. Russell; Just, Marion R. and Crigler, Ann N. Common Knowledge:
News and the Construction of Political Meaning. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992: A monograph detailing the method and results of an experiment
focusing on how people use the different media (TV, newspapers, magazines)
to derived political meaning.
O'Donnell, James J. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998: A classicist view of the comparisons
between the history of the written word and the coming electronic age.
Pacey, Arnold. The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development
of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976: A sweeping history of the
progress of technological invention from the Middle Ages to the present.
Purves, Alan C. The Scribal Society: An Essay on Literacy and Schooling
in the Information Age. New York: Longman, 1990: A thoughtful and wide-ranging
examination of the nature of writing, literacy and "scribal" culture.
Robertson, Douglas S. The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next
Level of Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: The author
argues that computers will change civilization, base in part on the idea that
the nature of civilization is determined by the quantity of information available
to it.
Schement, Jorge Reina and Curtis, Terry. Tendencies and Tensions of
the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the
United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995: A somewhat
contrarian analysis of the origins of the information age, focusing on the
argument that it emerged gradually out of the roots of the industrial age
rather than arising suddenly from the advent of computerization.
Slouka, Mark. "In Praise of Silence and Slow Time: Nature and Mind in
a Derivative Age." In Birkerts, Sven, ed. Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology
and the Muse. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996: 147-156: An anthology
of essays addressing the role of technology in the literary arts. The book
is an expansion of ideas visited in Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies,
in which the author argued that the sudden appearance of the computer was
changing everything about the way we lived, and not necessarily for the better.
Turner, Frederick. "The Electronic Revolution." In Howell, R. Patton,
ed. Beyond Literacy: The Second Gutenberg Revolution. San Francisco:
Saybrook, 1989: 128-133: A study of how the use of computers in an advance
over the use of books.
VI. E-commerce, Economics and Technology (PRO)
This section covers works which examine the benefits of e-commerce and online
business. It also looks at the relationship between the economy and modern-day
technology.
Agre, Philip E. "Designing Genres for New Media: Social, Ecomonic, and
Political Contexts." In Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting
Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1998: 69-99: Explores factors related to audience, use, and
content that need to be considered with designing a Web page.
Bennahum, David S. Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace. New
York: Basic Books, 1998: The first generation to grow up with computers, sense
of loss with the end of geekdom.
Bleecker, Samuel E. "The Emerging Meta-Mart." In Cornish, Edward, ed.
Exploring Your Future: Living, Learning, and Working in the Information
Age. Bethesda, MD: World Future Society, 1996" 55-57: An expansive essay
on the growth of e-commerce.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996: A magnum opus (first of three volumes) reflecting
on the sociological and political effects of the globalization of the network,
written in 1995 and early 1996.
Cavoukian, Ann and Tapscott, Don. Who Knows: Safeguarding Your Privacy
in a Networked World. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997: An advocative survey
of the emerging threats to privacy from information technology, with some
attention to the complications presented by the Internet.
Dertouzos, Michael L. What Will Be: How the New World of Information
Will Change Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997: A present-at-the-creation
view of the Internet, providing insightful and often anecdotal speculations
about how it will affect social, economic and political life in the near future.
Dizard, Wilson. Meganet: How the Global Communications Network Will
Connect Everyone on Earth. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997: A snapshot,
circa 1996, of the wiring of the world, which he calls the Meganet.
Highlights role of breakup of telecommunications monopolies (including retreat
from state political control abroad) and rise of privatization as key factors
in global expansion of the Net.
Gloor, Peter. Elements of Hypermedia Design: Techniques for navigation
and Visualization in Cyberspace. Boston: Birkhauser, 1997: Principles
of web and multimedia design and editing.
Gradwohl, Judith and Feldman, Gene. "Going Electronic: A Case Study of
'Ocean Planet' and Its On-line Counterpart." In Thomas, Selma and Mintz, Ann,
eds. The Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum. Washington, DC:
American Association of Museums, 1998: 173-190: An essay on the difficulties
of use of Web by museums.
Grossman, Wendy M. Net Wars. New York: New York University Press,
1997: A personal and ironically elitist look, in largely narrative form, of
the history (circa 1988-1997) of the Net, starting in the early 1990s and
examining how its sense of community and identity were transformed by its
mid-1990s success. "The wars along the border between cyberspace and real
life" [1]
Hansell, Saul. "Mouse Attack in Cyberspace." New York Times, 13
December 1998: 3:1, 10: Comments by Eisner on the firm's investment on the
Web.
Hendrix, Roger and Brazell, Rob. The Idea Economy. Salt Lake City:
Harbinger Books, 1995: A lay self-help treatise on the information economy
for "ideaprenuers."
Hughes, Thomas P. Rescuing Prometheus. New York: Pantheon Books,
1998: Studies of the changing management paradigms (modern hierarchical to
postmodern flat) of four "big-science" projects (air defense, Atlas, Boston
Tunnel and ARPANET). Also examines the pivotal importance of both the Pentagon
and key individuals e.g. UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock and ARPANET.
Kambil, Ajit. "Electronic Commerce: Implications of the Internet for
Business Practice and Strategy." In Alberts, David S. and Papp, Daniel S.,
eds. The Information Age: An Anthology on Its Impacts and Consequences.
Washington, DC: National Defense University Center for Advanced Concepts and
Technology, 1997: 225-248: An essay on management choices dictated by the
rise of e-commerce.
Kizza, Joseph Migga. Civilizing the Internet: Global Concerns and
Efforts Toward Regulation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998: A college-text-level
summary of the history and likely prospects of the Internet, with emphasis
on computer crime and its prevention.
McClain, Dylan Loeb. "Filling Up a Cart at the Internet Mall." New
York Times, 13 December 1998: 3:8: December 1998 figures for Web commerce,
plus projections.
McQuivey, James L. "How the Web Was Won: The Commercialization of Cyberspace."
In Ebo, Bosah, ed. Cyberghetto or Cybertopia? Race, Class, and Gender on
the Internet. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998: 83-99: An analysis of reaction
to ads shows that "library" is the dominant image.
Minoli, Daniel and Minoli, Emma. Web Commerce Technology Handbook.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998: A technical guide for businesses to electronic
commerce, security, and publishing on the Internet, the world wide web and
other electronic means, based on a course given by Minoli at the Stevens Institute
of Technology.
Mitchell, William J. "Equitable Access to the Online World." In Schon,
Donald A.; Sanyal, Bish and Mitchell, William J., eds. High Technology
and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information
Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: 151-162: An anthology of thoughtful
essays on the impact of information technology on the social and economic
life of urban society, with an emphasis on how the poor will and will not
be affected (from a 1996 MIT colloquium).
Norton, Bob and Smith, Cathy. Understanding the Virtual Organization.
Hauppauge, NY: Barron's Educational Series, 1997: A fairly basic handbook,
written in 1996, on how to use computers and telecommunications as business
tools.
Reid, Robert H. Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days That Built the Future
of Business. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997: A somewhat celebratory
chronicle of the World Wide Web's commercial (rather than technological) development
through the stories of early Web entrepreneurs, including Marc Andreeson of
Netscape, Andrew Anker of HotWired, Kim Polese of Java, Jerry Yang
of Yahoo! and others.
Rockwell, Browning. Using the Web to Compete in the Global marketplace.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998: A how-to guide for international e-commerce.
Segal, Robert L. "The Coming Electronic Commerce ®evolution." In
Alberts, David S. and Papp, Daniel S., eds. The Information Age: An Anthology
on Its Impacts and Consequences. Washington, DC: National Defense University
Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology, 1997: 203-223: An explication
of how e-commerce will change basic economics of distribution.
Siegel, Martha. How to Make a Fortune on the Internet. New York:
HarperCollins, 1997: An update of How to Make a Fortune on the Information
Superhighway to include information on advertising on the World Wide Web.
Stout, Rick. Web Site Stats: Tracking Hits and Analyzing Traffic.
Berkeley: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1997: A how-to guide to software and procedures
for tracking viewership of Websites.
Streeter, Thomas. "That Deep Romantic Chasm: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism,
and the Computer Culture." In Calabrese, Andrew and Burgelman, Jean-Claude,
eds. Communication, Citizenship, and Social Policy: Rethinking the Limits
of the Welfare State. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
1998: 49-64: An essay on the origins of the romantic libertarianism of computer
culture in a leftist anthology exploring the connection between welfare, communication
and social policy (from conference in October 1997).
Whittle, David B. Cyberspace: The Human Dimension. New York: W.H.
Freeman, 1997: Reflections on the possibilities of cyberspace.
Williams, Frederick. "The Information Society as an Object of Study."
In Williams, Frederick, ed. Measuring the Information Society. Newbury
Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988: 13-31: Implications of Information Society
(c 1988) with Texas as a case study after economic downturn of mid-1980s ('85-'87)
and the collapse of the "Silicon Prairies" dream.
Wolff, Michael. Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the
Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998: An entrepreneur's 1994-1996
tale of search for IPO; premise rests on essential tension between East Coast
(content) and West Coast (technology).
Ypsilanti, Dimitri and Gosling, Louisa. Towards a Global Information
Society: Global Information Infrastructure, Global Information Society: Policy
Requirements. Washington, DC: Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 1997: A study of impacts of e-commerce.
VII. E-commerce, Economics and Technology (CON)
This section lists works which explore the downside of e-commerce. There
is also a price to pay for linking our economy to technology to the extent
that we have.
Anuff, Joey and Cox, Ana Marie, eds. Suck: Worst-Case Scenarios in
Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet. San Francisco: Wired, 1997:
A reprint of web-based reviewsnotably expressive and somewhat contrarianof
media in all its electronic forms.
Bogart, Leo. Commercial Culture: The Media System and the Public Interest.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995: The media so inundate Americans that
it would take an enormous tome to accurately describe and knowingly criticize
all their effects on public judgment. For the most part, though, Bogart delivers
the goods on the multifaceted range of contemporary American media; what's
more, he makes meaningful suggestions for improvement. He takes on nearly
the entire range of contemporary journalism and mass culture outlets, from
newspapers to Hollywood, insisting that all relentlessly try to entertain
when they should inform. His basic points about commercialism rather than
the public's interest in quality determining what goes through media pipelines
have been made before, but rarely have they been as thoroughly researched
and passionately expressed. Oh, Bogart can sound a tad arrogant at times,
as in his blanket condemnation of rock music, and revolutionary new media,
such as the Internet, fall outside his overview. But his calling for more
intelligent criticism and his ways of discouraging media monopolies seem sound.
Although not the final word on the issues involved, Bogart's study is still
a very valuable contribution on them.
Brook, James and Boal, Iain A., eds. Resisting the Virtual Life: The
Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1995: The book examines downside of virtual life, circa 1994, from leftist,
anti-corporate, pro-labor perspective.
Canter, Laurence A. and Siegel, Martha S. How to Make a Fortune on
the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the
Internet and Other On-line Services. New York: HarperCollins, 1994: A
pre-Web how-to guide to spamming.
Castells, Manuel. End of the Millennium. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 1998: A magnum opus (third of three volumes on The Information
Age: Economy, Society and Culture) reflecting on the sociological and
political effects of the globalization of the network, written in 1997.
Collins, Ronald K.L. Dictating Content: How Advertising Pressure Can
Corrupt a Free Press. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Commercialism,
1992: An anecdotal study of examples of private censorship and self-censorship
due to commercial pressures.
Crawford, Rick. "Computer-Assisted Crisis. " In Gerbner, George; Mowlana,
Hamid and Schiller, Herbert I, eds. Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate
Control of Media Means for America and the World. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1996: 47-81: An anthology of leftist essays on the corporatization
and subsequent monopolization of communication and its unwanted global anddomestic
effects.
Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, Lord William. The Sovereign Individual:
How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1997: Laissez-faire predicts that nation-state
will be superseded by information economy in which, despite possible anarchy,
canny, technologically adept individuals will be able to amass and defend
assets.
De Jonge, Peter. "Riding the Wild, Perilous Waters of Amazon.com." New
York Times Magazine, 14 March 1999: 36-41,54,68,79,81: An inside look
at the culture of Amazon.com.
Dovey, Jon. "Introduction." In Dovey, Jon, ed. Fractal Dreams: New
Media in Social Context. London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996: xi-xviii:
The emergence of the Net is part of corporate takeover to which most are blinded
by utopian delusions.
Eisenstein, Zillah. Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and
the Lure of Cyberfantasy. New York: New York University Press, 1998: A
Marxist-feminist critique of corporate nature of power in cyberspace.
Forsythe, Chris; Grose, Eric and Ratner, Julie, eds. Human Factors
and Web Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. (no
abstract.)
Haywood, Trevor. Info-Rich, Info-Poor: Access and Exchange in the
Global Information Society. London: Bowker-Saur, 1995: An international
analysis of information is a means of attaining and maintaining wealth, emphasizing
information as a commodity and resource, like copper or wood. Also argues
that information is a means for rich countries to maintain power over poor
countries.
Johnson, Nicholas. "Freedom, Fun and Fundamentals: Defining Digital Progress
in a Democratic Society." In Gerbner, George; Mowlana, Hamid and Schiller,
Herbert I, eds. Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control of Media Means
for America and the World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996: 82-90: An
anthology of leftist essays on the corporatization, and subsequent monopolization,
of communication and its unwanted global and domestic effects.
Kizza, Joseph Migga. Ethical and Social Issues in the Information
Age. New York: Springer, 1997: An undergraduate computer science supplementary
text focusing on ethical and moral issues.
Lohr, Steve and Brinkley, Joel. " Gates on Tape: Scant Memory Of Key
Details." New York Times, 3 November 1998: A1, C8: (no abstract).
Mayhew, Deborah J. "Introduction." In Forsythe, Chris; Grose, Eric and
Ratner, Julie, eds. Human Factors and Web Development. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998: 1-13: An examination of the principles
of Web design, arguing for application of human-factor engineering principles
to Web page design.
McEachern, Tim and O'Keefe, Bob. Re-Wiring Business: Uniting Management
and the Web. New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1998: A guide to the possible
uses of the Internet (and WWW) for business.
Perelman, Michael. Class Warfare in the Information Age. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1998: A critique of the optimism of the Information Age's
ability to improve social and economic conditions.
Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: A study of the effects of the market-driven
(or neoliberal) imperatives that have taken over cyberspace, focusing
on globalism, social inequities, and unwanted effects on education. Also,
how cyberspace shapes the economy.
Schiller, Herbert I. Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public
Expression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989: A leftist critique
(circa 1989) of the ways in which corporate capitalism has come to dominate
and commercialize the sociocultural reality.
Schuler, Douglas. New Community Networks: Wired for Change. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996: A guide to the use of computer networks to foster
community action.
Shapiro, Carl and Varian, Hal R. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide
to the Network Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998: A
practical managerial guide to the workings of the "network economy," including
such matters are software versioning and pricing models, Web media cost and
rate structures, network contracts and property rights, compatibility and
standards issues, etc.
Sussman, Gerald. Communication, Technology, and Politics in the Information
Age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997: A textbook offering a
socialist/progressive/populist interpretation of rise and effects of information
technology, much based on teachings of Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci.
Serving the Community: A Public Interest Vision of the National Information
Infrastructure. Palo Alto, CA: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,
1994: CPSR report in 1994 expressing concerns about the Information Superhighway
or National Information Infrastructure (NII).
VIII. Communication and media evolution
This section covers works which deal with the history of communication, with
an emphasis on litearcy, writing/scribal culture and print.
Bazin, Patrick. "Toward Metareading." In Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The
Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996: 153-168:
A thoughtful anthology of balanced essays addressing the future of the book
which approaches the rise of digital technologies from a perspective that
is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic
Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994: A lyrical meditation on the nature
of reading and how it might change as we move from a print to an electronic
culture.
Cumming, Alister H., ed. Bilingual Performance in Reading and Writing.
Ann Arbor, MI: Language Learning, 1994: Both are studies of language and literacy
in bilingual contexts.
Debray, Regis. "The Book as Symbolic Object." In Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed.
The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996:
139-151: A thoughtful anthology of quite balanced essays addressing the future
of the book which approaches the rise of digital technologies from a perspective
that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
De Kerckhove, Derrick and Lumsden, Charles J., eds. The Alphabet and
the Brain: The Lateralization of Writing. New York: Springer Verlag, 1988:
A collection of interdisciplinary essays using neuroscience, psychology and
linguistics to explore the origins of the alphabet in Ancient Greece, the
subsequent rise of an Atheniean theatrical culture, and a speculative discussion
of its historical effects on development of the Western mind.
Duguid, Paul. "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book."
In Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996: 63-101: A thoughtful anthology of quite balanced
essays addressing the future of the book which approaches the rise of digital
technologies from a perspective that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor
overly enthusiastic.
Eiseley, Loren. The Invisible Pyramid. New York: University of
Nebraska Press, 1970/1998: A lyrical and wide-ranging rumination on the nature
of man and, indirectly, the misguided promise of space exploration.
Epskamp, C. P. On Printed Matter and Beyond: Media, Orality, and Literacy.
The Hague, Netherlands: Center for the Study of Education in Developing Countries,
1995: The book examines connection between orality and visual culture, emphasizing
education issues and examples from the Third World.
Halasz, Alexandra. The Marketplace of Print, Pamphlets, and the Public
Sphere in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997: A somewhat Postmodernist examination of how the rise of a new mass
market medium, like the printing of pamphlets in Shakespearean England,
is viewed as a threat.
Hesse, Carla. "Books in Time." In Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The Future
of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996: 21-36: A
thoughtful anthology of quite balanced essays addressing the future of the
book which approaches the rise of digital technologies from a perspective
that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
Hobart, Michael E. and Schiffman, Zachary S. Information Ages: Literacy,
Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998: A thoughtful history of information and its organization through
three periods (writing, printing, computers) in Western Civilization, emphasizing
mathematical representations of the world and information.
Holeton, Richard. Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge
in the Electronic Age. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998: An anthology containing
examination of the decline of print culture.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978: The book proposes a theory
of interaction between the text and the reader.
Junco de la Vega, Alejandro. Cyberspace and a Free Press. Reston,
VA: World Press Freedom Committee/Knight Foundation, 1997: How using a Web
server to release implicating documents circumvented attempt at intimidation
and censorship by corrupt government authorities.
Langer, Judith A., ed. Language, Literacy, and Culture. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex, 1987: A collection of essays, many case studies, on the uses of
reading in education.
Martin, Henri-Jean. The History and the Power of Writing. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995: Originally published in Paris in 1988,
a magisterial history of the written word, from pre-history through the printing
press to digital communication.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Idea in America. New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 1964: (no abstract).
Matsuda, Matt K. The Memory of the Modern. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996: A scholarly examination of the effects of historical memory in
late 19th-century France.
Morley, David and Robins, Kevin. Spaces of Identity: Global Media,
Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. New York; Routledge, 1995:
An exploration of the question of cultural identity under the conditions of
Postmodern geography, using the interplay of culture and communication and
focused largely on post-Cold War Europe and America's global domination.
Murray, Denise E. Knowledge Machines: Language and Information in
a Technological Society. New York: Longman, 1995: A Pre-Web study of the
interactions between language and technology, focusing on how they affect
our social processes and organization. Also deals with the social construction
of information technology and with the nature of word-processing and on-line
writing.
Nunberg. Geoffrey. "Farewell to the Information Age." In Nunberg, Geoffrey,
ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996: 103-138: A thoughtful anthology of quite balanced essays addressing
the future of the book which approaches the rise of digital technologies from
a perspective that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996: 103-138: A thoughtful anthology of balanced essays
addressing the future of the book which approaches the rise of digital technologies
from a perspective that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
O'Donnell, James. "Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus." In Nunberg, Geoffrey,
ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996: 37-62: A thoughtful anthology of balanced essays addressing the future
of the book which approaches the rise of digital technologies from a perspective
that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
O'Sullivan, Neil W. " Written and Spoken in the First Sophistic." In
Ian Worthington, ed. Voice Into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece.
New York: E.J. Brill, 1996: 115-129: A study demonstrating that the development
of writing changed the way Ancient Greek philosophers conducted their work,
including the fact that Plato was uncomfortable with the new medium.
Perez, Bertha and McCarty, Teresa L., eds. Sociocultural Contexts
of Language and Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.
Perkinson, Henry J. How Things Got Better: Speech, Writing, Printing,
and Cultural Change. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey. 1995: A study
of the role of language in the progress of human culture, arguing that, for
humans, language serves to express, signal, describe, and argue. Also posits
that language contributes to cultural evolution by enabling human beings first
to encode the existing culture and then to criticize it, which allows for
cultural improvement and progress.
Rafoth, Bennett A. and Rubin, Donald L., eds. The Social Construction
of Written Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988: An examination, from
the point of view of education, of how writing is shaped by the social context
in which it takes place.
Rogers, Theresa F. and Friedman, Nathalie S. Printers Face Automation:
The Impact of Technology on Work and Retirement among Skilled Craftsmen.
Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1980: A late 1970s study of the retraining
and retirement patterns among printers after the introduction of automation
through computerized "cold type."
Sale, Merritt W. "Homer and Advo: Investigating Orality through External
Consistency." In Ian Worthington, ed. Voice Into Text: Orality and Literacy
in Ancient Greece. New York: E.J. Brill, 1996: 21-43: A scholarly comparison
of Yugoslavian oral epics and the work of Homer.
Scheunemann, Dietrich. "'Collecting Shells' in the Age of Technological
Reproduction: On Storytelling, Writing, and the Film." In Scheunemann, Dietrich,
ed. Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media. Columbia, SC: Camden House,
1996: 79-94: Essays studying oral and written traditions of a range of European
historical and contemporary cultures, presented at a 1994 conference organized
by the University of Freiburg's Research Center for Orality and Literacy and
held at the University of Edinburgh.
Schiller, Dan. Theorizing Communication: A History. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996: A wide-ranging Leftist scholarly narrative
dealing with the historical transformation of communications into an area
of theoretical academic study, emphasizing how thinking and academic work
came to be considered "labor" and how human communication has changed this
century.
Simone, Raffaele. "The Body of the Text." In Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The
Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996: 239-251:
A thoughtful anthology of quite balanced essays addressing the future of the
book which approaches the rise of digital technologies from a perspective
that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
Slater, Niall W. " Literacy and Old Comedy." In Ian Worthington, ed.
Voice Into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece. New York:
E.J. Brill, 1996: 99-115: A scholarly study of Ancient Greek comedy at the
time of Aristophanes which demonstrates the periods distrust of the new technology
of writing.
Spender, Dale. Nattering on the Net: Women, Power, and Cyberspace.
North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 1995: Women's Studies Editor:
"Like most of us, Dale Spender has an insatiable curiosity which first made
her an avid reader and now an avid user of the Internet. But who controls
the Internet? Who writes the rules of conduct (unofficial as they may be.
She shares with us both the pitfalls and promises of this transition from
the written word to the electronic."
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" In Benedikt,
Michael, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991:
81-118: Epochs in the development of communities largely defined by their
use of communications technology.
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: Bantan Books, 1981:
(no abstract).
Howard, Tharon W. A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich,
CT: Ablex, 1997: A somewhat theoretical examination of how the rhetoric of
online communities is controlled, written in 1994 before full advent of Web.
Toschi, Luca. "Hypertext and Authorship." In Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The
Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996: 169-207:
A thoughtful anthology of quite balanced essays addressing the future of the
book which approaches the rise of digital technologies from a perspective
that is neither depressingly fatalistic nor overly enthusiastic.
Wiegand, Wayne A. "Introduction: Theoretical Foundations for Analyzing
Print Culture as Agency and Practice in a Diverse Modern America." In Danky,
James P. And Wiegand, Wayne A., eds. Print Culture in a Diverse America.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998: 1-13: A review article on print
culture studies and its four major themes.
"Inscriptions Suggest Egyptians Could Have Been the First to Write."
New York Times Magazine, 16 December 1998: A6: A new find of earlier
evidence of writing in Egypt.
IX. Cyberspace issues
This section lists work which examine modern-day communications, with a focus
upon computers, the Internet and cyberspace -- but does not include hypertext.
Bolhuis, Herman E. van and Colom, Vicente. Cyberspace Reflections.
Brussels: VUB Press, 1995: A study funded by the European Commission on the
social impact of cyberspace circa 1994.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the
History of Writing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991: A thoughtful
pre-Web discussion of the late age of print and dawn of the age of electronic
writing.
De Kerckhove, Derrick. Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the
Web Society. Toronto: Somerville House, 1997: A wide-ranging study of
how the computer and the Internet are changing the most basic ways we do business,
think, and communicate; also explores the new ways we are finding ourselves
connected to and interacting with the world as a result.
Gurak, Laura. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests
over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1997: A very specific study of communities and their uses of rhetoric
in cyberspace through case studies of the Lotus MarketPlace fiasco and the
Clipper chip protests.
Kalmbach, James R. The Computer and the Page: Publishing, Technology,
and the Classroom. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997: An examination of the nature
of writing and publishing, from prehistoric roots to writing for Web view.
Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium.
New York: Routledge, 1999: A thoughtful study applying McLuhan's prophetic
metaphors originally derived for television to the emerging digital age with
evident success.
Lunenfield, Peter. "Unfinished Business." In Lunenfield, Peter, ed. The
Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999: 6-22: A Postmodernist essay arguing that computers tend to encourage
leaving works in a state of "unfinish" because of the ease with which they
can be further manipulated and used.
Marsh, Harry. Creating Tomorrow's Mass Media. Fort Worth, TX:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995: A textbook comparing media forms.
Muspratt, Sandy; Luke, Allan and Freebody, Peter, eds. Constructing
Critical Literacies: Teaching and Learning Textual Practice. Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press, 1997: An anthology of Postmodernist essays on the theoretical
pedagogy of reading.
Nadin, Mihai. The Civilization of Illiteracy. Dresden, Germany:
Dresden University Press, 1997: An ambiguous tome philosophically positing
the decline of literacy.
Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Politics in Wired Nations. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998: A summary of a scholarly career in communication
study, with an emphasis on communication, policy and political freedom.
Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge,
1995: An overview, with critical commentary, on the various dominant theories
of the information society, including such scholars as Daniel Bell, Jean Baudrillard,
mark Poster, Manuel Castells, Herbert Schiller, and Jurgens Habermas.
X. Hypertext issues
This section focuses on current communications, with an emphasis on issues
related to hypertext.
Brody, Florian. "The Medium Is the Memory." In Lunenfield, Peter, ed.
The Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999: 130-149: An essay contrasting printed books with hypertext and
exploring how the medium of computer communication represents a new form of
memory.
Burbules, Nicholas, C. "Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical
Literacy." In Snyder, Ilana, ed. Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the
Electronic Era. New York: Routledge, 1998: 102-122: An essay examining
the nature of reading in the hypertext environment.
Hawisher, Gail E. And Selfe, Cynthia L. "Reflections on Computers and
Composition Studies at the Century's End." In Snyder, Ilana, ed. Page to
Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. New York: Routledge,
1998: 3-19: An essay summarizing studies on literacy in the computer-mediated
environment.
Jones, Robert Alan and Spiro, Rand J. "Contextualization, Cognitive Flexibility,
and Hypertext: The Convergence of Interpretive Theory, Cognitive Psychology,
and Advance Information Technologies." In Star, Susan Leigh, ed. The Cultures
of Computing. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995: 146-157: An essay
examining how hypertext may be effecting a convergence between critical theory
(with its poststructuralist distrust of hierarchy) and, via cognitive flexibility
theory, cognitive psychology.
Landlow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992:
(no abstract).
Landow, George P. "Hypertext as Collage-Writing." In Lunenfield, Peter,
ed. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1999: 150-171: An essay arguing that hypertext writing is a form
of collage where the reader can have many different stories depending on how
she accesses the text.
Lankshear, Colin. Changing Literacies. Philadelphia: Open University
Press, 1997: A discussion of information technologies use in the classroom
and the notion of literacy as a form of technological competency.
Snyder, Ilana. "Beyond the Hype: Reassessing Hypertext." In Snyder, Ilana,
ed. Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. New York:
Routledge, 1998: 125-143: A summarizing essay examining scholarship on the
nature of hypertext.
XI: Gender, feminism, societal roles & issues
This section examines general theories about gender and feminism. It looks
not only at theory but also the societal role the two play in America and
what gender and feminist issues are important today.
Block, Fred. Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic
Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990: A progressive
reformulation of the social theories of the Postindustrial Society.
Branscomb, Anne Wells. Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public
Access. New York: Basic Books, 1994: An early-1900s (pre Web) study of
the legal nature of information ownership.
Florman, Samuel C. "The Feminist Face of Antitechnology." In MacKenzie,
Nancy R., ed. Science and Technology Today: Readings for Writers. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1995: 238-246: An essay arguing that feminism is
leading women to pursue explicit power rather than the sort of underlying
understanding that the engineering vocation confers.
Forbes, Edith. Exit to Reality. Seattle: Seal Press, 1997: The 29th
century has arrived and such inconveniences as war, disease, poverty, and
unemployment have been rendered obsolete, allowing humans to work and live
easily and efficiently. They are also free to contemplate their own seemingly
worthless existence and strict adherence to rigid societal norms. This existential
dilemma is particularly acute for Lydian, an information analyst suffering
from acute boredom. An unlikely cure arrives in the form of Merle, a mysterious
stranger who somehow lives beyond the boundaries of the prescribed culture,
and who is capable of altering his form and gender. This chance meeting leads
to an affair that provides Lydian with the excitement she craves, as well
as a means of escape from both the confines of a sterile culture and a self-imposed
psychological prison. Exit to Reality examines the role of technology
in a modern society, confronting the question of who is truly in control.
Gray, Adele and Alphonso, Gina. New Game, New Rules: Jobs, Corporate
America, and the Information Age. New York: Garland, 1996: A collection
of self-help aphorisms about contemporary entrepreneurial and workplace issues,
initially produced as an MBA thesis project.
Hage, Jerald and Powers, Charles H. Post-Industrial Lives: Roles and
Relationships in the 21st Century. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications,
1992: A thoughtful sociological study of the effect of the postindustrial
transformation on work roles, face-to-face social relationships, and the character
of the social self.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest.Witness@Second.Millennium.FemaleMan.Meets.OncoMouse:
Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997: A deeply impressionistic
and Postmodernist inquiry into the connections between feminism and science,
examining reproductive freedom, biological approaches to race, and other issues
which can contribute to a feminist, multicultural study of technoscience.
Jones, Bruce. Sprinter: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1998: A
novel about a female former ATF agent hired by the FBI to combat a mad genius,
the Solobomber, who has taken over every government database.
Kelly, Ursula A. Schooling Desire: Literacy, Cultural Politics and
Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, 1997: A radical Postmodernist and feminist
explication of the role of Eros in the classroom.
Lubar, Steven. "Men/Women/Production/Consumption." In Horowitz, Roger
and Mohun, Arwen, eds. His and Hers: Gender, C