AN EVALUATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY:

DIGITAL CULTURE, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, THE INTERNET, THE WEB

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 technology’s 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 humanity’s 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 beliefs of 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: Mankind’s 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 Schumacher’s 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 humanity’s 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. Martin’s 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 Studies–which sociologist Aronowitz heads–at 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 reviews–notably expressive and somewhat contrarian–of 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 and domestic 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, Consumption, and Technology. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998: 7-37: A monograph on the contrasting gender-based historical interpretations of technology. Part of an anthology on gender and technology from the early 19th Century to the mid-20th Century.

Miles, Ian; Rush, Howard; Turner, Kevin and Bessant, John. Information Horizons: The Long-Term Social Implications of New Information Technologies. Aldershot (Hants), UK: Edward Elgar, 1988: A reasoned look circa 1988 at the possible economic and social effects of information technology through a structuralist perspective.

Noelle-Neuman, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993: The theory of public opinion based on difference between what people think and what they are willing to express.

Plant, Sadie. Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997: A poetically idiosyncratic and radically feminist look at technology, particularly the Internet, speculating on how it expands the way we look at language, communication, and human interaction. The work's discourse on computers is interlaced with biographical information on Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician and computer science.

Rasmussen, Terje. Communication Technologies and the Mediation of Social Life: Elements of a Social Theory of the New Media. Oslo: University of Oslo Department of Media and Communication, 1996: Attempts to create a sociological theory of "technology-mediated action" that provides a basis for a postmodern understanding of the interrelationships between the individual, society and technology.

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Viking, 1998: An original if speculative work arguing that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain, causing profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, it suggests that pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. But posits an iconic revolution, now under way, that began in the nineteenth century: the return of the image. The invention of photography and the discovery of electromagnetism have brought us film, television, video, computers, advertising, graphics–and a shift from the dominance of the left hemisphere to reassertion of the right. Image information has gradually been superseding print information, and in the resulting social revolution women have benefited as society shifts to embrace feminine values.

Sherman, Aliza. Cybergrrl! A Woman's Guide to the World Wide Web. New York: Ballantine, 1998: A "woman's guide" to the Web for both personal and professional uses, predicated on dealing with fears ("The Big Bad 'Net").

Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996: Examines electronic technologies in poplar culture, finding that some examples support long-standing sex role stereotyping, while others have changed techno-erotic imagery. Specifically, uses the depiction of and the commentary around cyborgs as a means of understanding current attitudes toward sexuality and gender roles.

Steiner, Peter. "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." (cartoon). New Yorker 5 July 1993: 61. In Sudweeks, Fay; McLaughlin, Margaret and Rafaeli, Sheizaf, eds. Network and Netplay: Virutal Groups on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Sudweeks, Fay; McLaughlin, Margaret and Rafaeli, Sheizaf, eds. Network and Netplay: Virutal Groups on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998: An anthology of scholarly research dealing with Internet computer-mediated communication (CMC), including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Usenet newsgroups, MUDs, etc. Published in 1998, but clearly pre-Web in its orientation, with most of the articles apparently written 1996 or earlier.

Wakeford, Nina. "Networking Women and Grrrls with Information /Communication Technology: Surfing Tales of the World Wide Web." In Terry, Jennifer and Calvert, Melodie, eds. Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. 51-66: Postmodernist feminist essays from a year-long project circa 1994-1995 on gender and technology at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University.

Wolff, Michael. "Review Review," New York, 12 October 1998: 24,26,106: What constitutes "print" in cultural terms is changing, just as the traditional borders between individual forms of print are falling.

"Rick Rozar." The Economist, 17 October 1998: 102: Using the Internet to search for personal data on individuals was perfected by Rozar's CDB Infotek (sold in 1996 for $95 million).

XII. Issues in Philosophy, Postmodernism, religion and spirituality

This section covers works which explore the philosophical aspects of the communications revolution, focusing on issues such as Postmodernism, religion and spirituality.

Aronowitz, Stanley and Menser, Michael. "On Cultural Studies, Science and Technology." In Aronowitz, Stanley; Martinsons, Barbara and Menser, Michael, eds. Technoscience and Cyberculture: A Cultural Study. New York, Routledge, 1996: 7-28: An anthology of cultural studies essays on the interdisciplinary study of science and technology (from 1994 CUNY conference).

Benedikt, Michael "Introduction." In Benedikt, Michael, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991: 1-12: Utopian speculations circa 1990 about the possibilities of cyberspace, with emphases on architecture, film, design and eroticism.

Birkerts, Sven. Readings. New York: Gray Wolf Press, 1999: An anthology of declinist essays comparing knowledge and information and print and electronic media.

Boyer, M. Christine. CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996: A collection of Postmodernist essays exploring the analogy between the matrix of computer data and the idea of the city.

Brahm, Gabriel Jr. and Driscoll, Mark, eds. Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995: An anthology of Postmodernist essays on the political dimension of cyborgs (cybernetic organism) and the "collision between human and machine."

Carrithers, Gale H. Mumford, Tate, Eiseley: Watchers in the Night. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992: A study of both the lives and writings of three accomplished practitioners of the declinist and oppositional prophetic essay, all troubled by the advent of technological modernity.

Chartier, Roger. On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997: A pre-Web (1986-1994) collection of critical theory essays on the nature of language, texts and history by a noted Foucaultian French cultural philosopher.

Cobb, Jennifer J. CyberGrace: The Search for God in the Digital World. New York: Crown, 1998: A metaphysical attempt to reconcile technology with spirituality.

Cross, Gary and Szostak, Rick. Technology and American Society: A History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995: A historical text on the development of American technology.

Debray, Régis. Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms. New York: Verso, 1996: A deeply Postmodernist reflection on the nature of "mediology" and the philosophical sources of power in language and image.

Gehlen, Arnold. Man in the Age of Technology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980: A theory of post-institutional man.

Gelernter, David. Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology. New York: Basic Books, 1997: A reflection on the role of beauty and aesthetics in computer technology, calling for a search for "deep beauty," the marriage of power and simplicity.

Gerbel, Karl and Weibel, Peter, eds. Mythos Information: Welcome to the Wired World. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995: A compendium of presentations from an international conference and symposium, Ars Electronica 95, held in 1995 in Linz (Austria).

Gimpel, Jean. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976: A study of the rise of medieval technology.

Gimpel, Jean. The End of the Future: The Waning of the High-Tech World. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995: The author argues that the West has reached a plateau of technological innovation that marks the end of a 1000-year cycle.

Godzich, Wlad. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994: A Postmodernist reflection on history and literary theory.

Kelly, Kevin . Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Longman, 1995: A daring but somewhat rambling theoretical exploration of the computer-driven convergence of social, economic and even biological reality.

Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957: A philosophical discourse on the history of astronomy and cosmology from Nicholas of Cusa to Isaac Newton, which originated as the 1953 Noguchi Lecture in the History of Medicine.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982: A Postmodernist explication of a philosophy of aesthetics.

Kennedy, Paul. Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. New York, Random House, 1993: After reading this gloomy exercise in futurology, even the most cockeyed optimists will feel justified in hiding under their bedcovers as the turn of the century approaches. Kennedy (History/Yale Univ.) explores again, with wider and more contemporary applications, a principal theme of his controversial bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987): that we must factor nonmilitary elements into traditional equations of national security. Kennedy can be provocative and prescient: his notion of ``global overreach'' in that earlier book, for instance, was borne out by the collapse of the Soviet Union and by the severe strains on the American economy. This time, he attempts to show how transnational forces, beyond the control of individual countries, inevitably will create world instability. Behind this unrest is a Malthusian population explosion (the world had 2 billion inhabitants in 1925, compared with 5.3 billion in 1990) that will be exacerbated by environmental dangers, the new global economy, robotics, and biotechnology. Kennedy guesses who the winners and losers will be in this changed world (Japan, with its highly educated, cohesive population and technological orientation, will fare better than the US, with its aging, multiethnic populace). Even the industrialized North will not be immune from the mass migrations and deteriorating environment of the Third World. Kennedy is most insightful in pointing out overlooked factors underlying crises: the fast-growing, youthful, impatient masses behind the Intifada and the troubles of Northern Ireland, for example, or the loss of forests and topsoil fueling the Haitian migration to the US. He regards economic growth as a zero-sum game that will damage an environmentally fragile planet, however, and he offers few remedies to avert the catastrophes he sees looming. Brilliant and discerning on the inevitable pressures on the rich North from the developing world (e.g., from Somalia)--but only hard-core Cassandras will accept Kennedy's pessimism about nations' inability to mobilize the will or resources to change the planet.

Kitchin, Rob. Cyberspace: The World in the Wires. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998: A thoughtful overview of both practical developments and scholarly engagement with cyberspace circa 1998.

Plato. "Phaedrus." in The Dialogs of Plato Volume III: The Trial and Death of Socrates. Edited and translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Bigelow, Brown: n.d.: The Platonic dialogue about the nature of love, rhetoric, speech, and writing.

Poster, Mark. The Second Media Age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995: A wide-ranging synthesis of Postmodernist social theory as it relates to media evolution...but bounded by conventions of pre-Web online world.

Sarewitz, Daniel. Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996: A critical study of the mindset of American scientists and government scientific policy, arguing that scientists are indeed responsible for their research's social impact and that social need should guide scientific research.

Sassower, Raphael. Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience. New York: Routledge: 1995: A thoughtful and largely jargon-free study of the philosophy of science that attempts to reconcile the indeterminacy of Postmodernism with the rationality of science, emphasizing the need for "translation" between contending discourses.

Schwartz, Joseph. The Creative Moment: How Science Made Itself Alien to Modern Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 1992: A discussion of how uninformed the general population has become about science and the means of material production in the last hundred years, resulting in fear and awe instead of understanding.

Smart, Barry. Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies. New York: Routledge, 1992: A good survey of Postmodernist social thought and somewhat Utopian speculation on the nature of progress and social change.

Stichler, Richard N. and Hauptman, Robert, eds. Ethics, Information, and Technology: Readings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998: An anthology of reprinted essays, circa pre-1995 and therefore pre-Web, on the ethical considerations of the Information Age.

Thomas, Carol G. "Wingy Mysteries in Divinity." In Ian Worthington, ed. Voice Into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece. New York: E.J. Brill, 1996: 179-195: A study examining effects of the change in conveying religious knowledge from oral transmission to written transmission, focusing on resulting decentralization of religion.

Tipler, Frank J. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday, 1994: A scientific argument that foresees the evolution of computer intelligence into an equivalent of God. Offers a cosmological theory he calls the Omega Point, based on the expansion of intelligent life to fill the known universe. Since the distances between habitable planets are so great, only space-going computers can ever hope to colonize the universe, he argues. The constant increase of computer intelligence will allow future computers not only to equal human accomplishments, but to recreate in exact detail all human beings who have ever lived. Tipler's insistence on calling this recreation a "resurrection" seems to be overstating his case. Similarly, a universal computer intelligence may be the sort of deity suitable to science fiction, but not one that many church-goers would find satisfactory. As tests of his theory, Tipler makes several predictions, one of which, involving the mass of the top quark, is in agreement with recently obtained experimental data, but most of which the average reader has no way to evaluate. He devotes the concluding chapters to consideration of such traditional theological questions as the problem of evil, the nature of heaven and hell, and a comparison of the Omega Point theory to the views of the world's great religions. An Appendix for Scientists provides more rigorous presentation of his arguments for those capable of following advanced mathematics. Tipler is wrestling with issues of enormous importance, but in the end his answers seem highly idiosyncratic and unlikely either to convert the skeptics or to satisfy the religious.

Virilio, Paul. The Virilio Reader. Edited by James Der Derian. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. The postmodern loss of public ethos.

Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. New York: Norton. 1999: An examination of many different kinds of space (spiritual space, physical space, celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace and cyberspace) to show that our new ideas about cyberspace are part of an evolution of how we think about space and to show parallels between modern thoughts about cyberspace and medieval religious concepts.

Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992: A lay and argumentative rendering of the pre-Web Internet, by a British talk-show host, emphasizing a skeptical view of the claims of Postmodern virtual realists and hyperrealists.

XIII. PROGRESS, Ludditism, Anti-Ludditism

This sectin includes works which explore matters related to conflict about technology. In particular, the works examine Ludditism and Anti-Ludditism, as well as questions of progress.

Alexandra, John. Mephistopheles' Anvil: Forging a More Human Future. Spring Valley, NY: Rose Harmony Publications, 1996: A call for a "postmodern" spiritual awakening that will reject the freedom/curse of technology. Also equates technology with evils of 20th century and loss of spirituality.

Chodos, Robert; Hamovitch, Eric and Murphy, Rae. Lost in Cyberspace? Toronto: James Lorimer Publishers, 1997: An examination of the suspect prospects and possible effect of the Internet for Canada. A critique from a nationalistic perspective by reluctant proponents.

Gelernter, David. Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology. New York: Basic Books, 1997: A reflection on the role of beauty and aesthetics in computer technology, calling for a search for "deep beauty," the marriage of power and simplicity.

George, Frank. Machine Takeover: The Growing Threat to Human Freedom in a Computer-Controlled Society. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1977: An idiosyncratic and philosophically anti-modernist study (circa 1976) of the social and political problems posed by computerization.

Henderson, Bill. "The Lead Pencil Club." In Henderson, Bill, ed. Minutes of the the [sic] Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1996: 1-12: The essay claims the Web will be useless because it is too inclusive.

Hine, Thomas. Facing Tomorrow: What the Future Has Been, What the Future Can Be. New York: Knopf, 1991: A gracefully written look at the historical and contemporary concept of the future, with an argument for "subtlety" rather than mastery.

Holtzman Steven. Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace. New York, Simon & Schuster. 1997: A speculative lay exposition, informed by the ideas of McLuhan and Derrida, on the possible affects on the arts and culture of the advent of cyberspace.

Kroker, Arthur and Weinstein, Michael A. Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994: The book posits that "technotopia is about disappearance," "the will to virtuality," and the "Recline of the West." [2]

Kyle, David T. Human Robots and Holy Mechanics: Reclaiming Our Souls in a Machine World. Portland, OR: Swan/Raven, 1993: The book equates corporate dominance of economy and culture with loss of spiritual meaning.

Marx, Leo. "Information Technology in Historical Perspective." 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: 130-149: 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).

McCorduck, Pamela. The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1985: A pre-Internet study tracing the history of print which draws parallels to rise of computers as intellectual tools; also presents the optimistic argument that computers will increase human potential.

Michunas, Algis. "Technological Culture." In Murphy, John W.; Michunas, Algis; and Pilotta, Joseph J., eds. The Underside of High-Tech: Technology and the Deformation of Human Sensibilities. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986: 1-13: The book explores how technology devaluates nature, elevates man above nature and dominates nature through technical means. Technology, they argue, steals emotion and color out of human life and turns it into a series of commands.

Mills, Stephanie, ed. Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the 21st Century. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997: The transcripts of 1993 and 1994 "megatechnology" conferences of self-described Neo-Luddites.

Pursell, Carroll. "The American Ideal of Democratic Technology." In De Lauretis, Teresa; Huyssen, Andreas and Woodward, Kathleen M., eds. The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions. Madison, WI, Coda Press, 1980: 11-25: An essay cautioning about the historic possibilities of the technological threat to democratic freedoms.

Pursell, Carroll. The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995: A social history of American technology, this is a Leftist critique arguing that technology as created a social hegemony which determines how we both live and evaluate that life. Also suggests that technoscience's management techniques and research are the military-industrial legacy of World War II.

Reinecke, Ian. Electronic Illusions: A Skeptic's View of our High-Tech Future. New York: Penguin Books, 1984: An Old-Left Luddite polemic about evils of technology in general and computerization in particular. Originally published in the UK under the title Micro Invaders 82.

Rivers, Theodore John. Contra Technologiam: The Crisis of Value in a Technological Age. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993: A learned philosophical essay on the historical and contemporary moral, spiritual and cultural effects of technology.

Rochlin, Gene I. Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997: A study arguing that society is developing a possibly dangerous over-reliance on computers.

Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinikng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: A thoughtful, elegantly written Luddite argument that suggests the rise of computers, with its attendant social, cultural, economic and political effects, injuring our capacity of human thought.

Sanders, Barry. A Is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media and the Silencing of the Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994: Pre-Web work on problematic nature of electronic media, particularly as it applies to young people and their sense of self.

Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984: A leftist critique (circa 1984) of the ways in which information technology increases the power of corporate capitalism.

Slouka, Mark. War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1995: A thoughtful Luddite narrative arguing that people espousing the superiority of virtual reality have lost sight of the fact that human values and thought are based upon the experiences of the physical world. As a result, the values promoted in cyberspace are damaging from a humanist point of view.

Stein, Bob. "We Could Be Better Ancestors Than This: Ethics and First Principles for the Art of the Digital Age." In Lunenfield, Peter, ed. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: 172-197: A wide-ranging essay on the nature of the new digital culture, striking a cautionary tone about possible unwanted effects.

Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Doubleday, 1995: From Booklist, April 15, 1995, "When a computer expert has second thoughts about the information highway, we should slow down and listen. Stoll is skeptical of the overblown promises of technology mavens, government officials, industry hacks, and educators that, he says, first produce bloated expectations and then burst bubbles. "Lotus-eaters, beware," he writes, virtual reality is no substitute for the real thing: computers alter our thinking processes; they isolate us and minimize social interactions; they are expensive and difficult to use; and they become obsolete in a few years. The Internet is a disorganized waste land, and E-mail isn't as good as the U.S. Postal Service. Ultimately, though, Stoll contradicts himself too often: in one sentence, he fears the demise of libraries; in the next, he states why book-based libraries won't disappear. What's more, he undermines his argument's seriousness with comic footnotes and deliberately improper grammar. Still, his book signals the first wave in the backlash against the race to the future that computer technology now represents." Benjamin Segedin, American Library Association.

Strong, David. Crazy Mountains: Learning from Wilderness of Weigh Technology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995: A Walden-like reflection on the lure of technology and consumer culture, with a lyrical argument for a more "natural" and ecologically aware way of life.

Talbott, Steve L. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in our Midst. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1995: A idealistic humanist's critique of social role of computer, emphasizing the ideas of Owen Barfield and arguing for a less mechanistic view of education and society.

Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Knopf, 1996: An elegant survey on the nature of unintended consequences inherent in technological developments in health, the environment, agriculture, the workplace and computers. Posits something called the "revenge effect."

Venerable, Grant. The Paradox of the Silicon Savior: Charting the Reformation of the High-Tech Super-State. San Francisco: MVM Productions, 1987: A collection of highly personal metaphysical musings, circa the mid-1980s, on the possible meanings to be found in the spread of computer technology.

Sardar, Ziauddin and Ravetz, Jerome R. "Introduction: Reaping the Technological Whirlwind." In Sardar, Ziauddin and Ravetz, Jerome R., eds. Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway. New York: New York University Press, 1996: 1-11: An anthology of essays questioning the faith that cybertechnologies will enhance our quality of life.