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