Browse Books

Reviewer: Shrisha Rao

The information age offers promises, as well as challenges, that are as significant as those arising from the industrial revolution of past centuries. Many important social issues must be understood and confronted, for example, the digital divide, a disparity of Internet access between the haves and the have-nots that contemporary thinkers suggest is of the utmost importance. This monograph, by two pioneers in sociological research concerning the Internet, is a welcome foray into the study of these kinds of social issues. The authors discuss basic issues, and also consider the Internet as a tool of social interaction and communal action. The book, which follows the pattern of standard studies in sociology in its approach to the Internet, unfortunately falls short in many critical areas. For example, there is no mention of issues arising out of bandwidth disparity (granting that all who have access to the Internet are equal, those who have high-speed access to the Internet are, in an Orwellian sense, more equal than those relying on phone modems). Spam, also known as junk email, possibly the single biggest nuisance on the Internet in the present day (and likely to so remain, much to everyone's annoyance), is not discussed at all, except for the authors' casual and rather questionable claim that "spam and pyramid marketing can be seen as computer-enhanced extensions of ongoing activities in everyday life" (p. 200). No mention is made of the recent landmark antitrust case brought against Microsoft Corporation. for its anticompetitive practices, especially as seen in its bundling of its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system. (The guilty verdict against the defendant, and the settlement reached, has perhaps had as wide-ranging social consequences as anything considered in the book). File sharing, especially of music, is all the rage since Napster, as every teenager on the 'Net knows, but you wouldn't know it by reading this book. Mention is made of Web sites by and about Rudolph Guiliani and other social figures, with no direct bearing on the Internet, but not of Tim Berners-Lee, or of other Internet pioneers. Possibly because of the authors' lack of training in, and lack of appreciation of, technical issues, there are other glaring errors and omissions in the text as well, of the kind that no one in the computer science community would make. There is no discussion of the open-source/free software movement [1], GNU, gcc, Emacs, and so on. Linux is very briefly, and not-too-accurately, dealt with in a couple of paragraphs, without further mention of the thousands of other artifacts that are also similarly created. These matters are probably par for the course, considering that most sociologists, as well as other scholars in the humanities, have little depth of understanding in the computing sciences, and computer scientists, in turn, are not known for their scholarship in the humanities. Writings that bridge these disciplines are thus liable to fall short in one respect or the other. The old question, "If writers can't program and programmers can't write, who's writing user documentation__?__" [2] takes on a whole new meaning. A thorough study of the topic of this book should have also included carefully chosen readings of authors with a more informed perspective on the computing sciences and technology. Online Computing Reviews Service