American Quarterly - Book Review

Live Free or Die? Death, Life, Survival, and Sobriety on the Information SuperhighwayThe Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives by FrancesCairncross; Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age by Esther Dyson; Data Smog:Surviving the Information Glut by David Shenk; Rewired: A Brief (and Opinionated) NetHistory by David HudsonReview by: Roy RosenzweigAmerican Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 160-174Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30041637 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

Live Free Or Die? Death, Life, Survival, And Sobriety On The Information Superhighway

ROY ROSENZWEIG

George Mason University

The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. By Frances Cairncross. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997. 303 pages. $24.95.

Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. By Esther Dyson. New York: Broadway Books, 1997. 307 pages. $25.00.

Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. By David Shenk. San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997. 250 pages. $24.00.

Rewired: A Brief (and Opinionated) Net History. By David Hudson in association with eLine Productions. Indianapolis: Macmillan Techni- cal Publishing, 1997. 327 pages. $29.99.

WITHIN FIVE YEARS OF ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL'S FIRST DISPLAY OF HIS

telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Scientific American prom- ised that the new device would bring a greater "kinship of humanity" and "nothing less than a new organization of society." Others were less sanguine, worrying that telephones would spread germs through the wires, destroy local accents, and give authoritarian governments a listening box in the homes of their subjects. The Knights of Columbus fretted that phones might wreck home life, stop people from visiting friends, and create a nation of slugs who would not stir from their desks.'

Roy Rosenzweig is a CAS Distinguished Scholar in history and Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He is co-author (with David Thelen) of the recently published The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. His current work focuses on the history of the Internet.

American Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1 (March 1999) © 1999 American Studies Association

160



LIVE FREE OR DIE? 161

Extravagant predictions of utopia or doom have accompanied most new communications technologies, and the same rhetoric of celebration and denunciation has enveloped the Internet. For Wired magazine publisher Louis Rossetto, the digital revolution promises "social changes so pro- found that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire." According to Iraq's official government newspaper, Al-Jumhuriya, the Internet spells "the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics."2

The four books reviewed here partake of this same bifurcated tendency toward visions of utopia and dystopia-even if none is quite as hyperbolic as the respective mouthpieces of the "digital revolution" and Saddam Hussein. These accounts provide important insights into the current state of the information superhighway, but they are most revealing as cultural documents in their own right that tell us something about the United States at the end of the century. New technologies may be socially neutral but the responses to them are deeply embedded in the culture and politics of the moment. And because these particular accounts come largely from computer industry insiders, they are especially informative about the ideology and politics of that industry and its associated pundits. As we move toward the end of the millennium, the Internet itself begins to look much less distinctive and much more typical of current society-offering a similar mix of shopping and social activism, of mindless entertainment and mind- challenging ideas. But the world of cybercommentary and computer industry ideology retains a more distinctive spin-featuring hyperbolic celebrations and critiques as well as a decided preference for libertarian positions on how society should respond to new technology.

Frances Cairncross's The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives is a typical work of cyberenthusiasm. "The death of distance as a determinant of the cost of communicating," she announces on page one, "will probably be the single most important force shaping society in the first half of the century." It will "revolutionize the way people live" and "alter . . . decisions about where people work and what kind of work they do, concepts of national sovereignty, and patterns of international trade." Cairncross does not hesitate to make remarkably banal predictions, promising that "the death of distance" will lead to "The Proliferation of Ideas," "A New Trust," "Redistribution of Wages," the "Rebirth of Cities," "Improved Writing and Reading Skills," the "Rebal- ance of Political Power," and--even-"Global Peace."

If you can get past the inflated rhetoric, Cairncross usefully summarizes some important changes in communications technology and practice. In



162 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

1956, for example, the transatlantic telephone cable only permitted eighty- nine simultaneous telephone conversations between the United States and Europe. By 2000, a few strands of fiber optic cable will carry more than three million conversations across the ocean. A three minute call to London that cost about $50 (in current dollars) in the mid-1950s can be made for $.30 today. Such changes have brought a new mental communications map of the world, in which such far-away places as Sydney and Hong Kong are "closer" (in cost) than Cairo and Nairobi. Networked computers are further altering that mental map, entirely erasing cost as a factor in distant communication. Cairncross is probably most useful in pushing us to think about what such changes might mean for categories like the local and the national. When it is just as easy (and cheap) to communicate with people half way around the world as half way around the block will our "imagined communities" be transformed, thereby further eroding the already weakening nation state? Does the category of "American studies," for example, make any sense in a globally wired world?

Of course, Cairncross, as an Economist writer, focuses on doing business, not scholarship, in a wired world. Customers, she argues, will be targeted more precisely, advertising markets will fragment, advertising will become more interactive, distribution costs will decline, firms will get smaller, and the market will become more global. Sometimes, her champi- oning of new modes of electronic selling takes on a comic tone as when in a modern update of the theme of "darkest Africa," she announces-without apparent irony-that "in many parts of the world ... television shopping is unknown." It is hard to argue with Cairncross that new communications media are transforming the world of commerce, but there is a large gap between promises of world peace, on the one hand, and predictions of the global spread of the toll-free number, on the other.

Cairncross periodically pauses in her drumbeat of information age boosterism to acknowledge some possible problems. She manages to avoid their implications either by simply embracing contradictory conclusions or by quickly changing the subject. She asserts that the information age will lead to the decline of the giant firm and the rise of the small company even as she presents persuasive evidence that communications companies are "monopoly prone" (81). She further insists that the new communications media will erode the advantages of first world nations even while she observes the American dominance of global communications networks like the Internet. She also acknowledges that "two out of three on the




planet still have no access at all to the telephone." Rather than dwell on this seeming road block along the information superhighway, she immediately shifts gears: "But the good news is that, in many parts of the world, people are receiving telephone service for the first time." Cairncross, thus, offers us little help in thinking about two of the most important questions posed by the rise of the Internet and other communications networks: Will these technologies lead to the dominance of the world economy by giant corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Time-Warner, and AT&T? And will they further reinforce (or widen) existing gaps between rich and poor people and nations?

In Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, Esther Dyson matches Cairncross's boundless enthusiasm for the cyberfuture. Dyson is one of the first celebrities in a world in which most leading figures seem too nerdy for such status. "For such an intellectual," gushes her book's publicist, "she's as popular as a movie star. We can't keep up with the media requests."3 Even if not all its requests have been answered, the media has responded with flattery, calling her a "cyber-guru," "philoso- pher-queen of high tech," "leader of the Net-erati," and one of the fifty most important people in the "New Establishment." The book itself displays her celebrity status with her picture prominently emblazoned on the cover, her name in larger type than the title, and a Web site that promotes the book with an "Esther-Bot" that tells you "Where on the Web is Esther Dyson?"

In an "interview" on that Web site, she explains that the subtitle "reminded me of that wonderful play, "A Design for Living"-a little bit arch with some deep thinking underneath." Unfortunately, it reminded me of that other guru of contemporary "living"-Martha Stewart. And like Stewart (albeit on a smaller scale), Dyson is a personal conglomerate built around a celebrity entrepreneur who offers different products for different sorts of consumers: the superrich can invest with her EDventure Holdings; "leading players" in high tech industry can attend her annual PC forum (at $3,900 a pop, if you can snag a ticket); other insiders can subscribe (for $695 per year) to her newsletter, Release 1.0. Release 2.0-like the Martha Stewart housewares line at Kmart-is the mass-market version of Dyson. It is also (to continue the Martha Stewart analogy) a kind of how-to book for the digital age-a guide to being "digitally correct."4

Like Stewart, Dyson aims to assimilate the reader into the prevailing culture rather than to offer a critical perspective. Dyson predictably enthuses over the "richness and potential of the net," which will give




"power to the powerless," foster "the development of communities," "give employees the upperhand in negotiations with employers," and "serve as a vehicle for greater attention to education" (2, 8, 32, 77, 83). Yet this Net boosterism is only part of Dyson's book, which also includes an intelligent introduction to some of the key problems posed by the digital age- governance, intellectual property, censorship, privacy, anonymity, and security. Here, we get the benefit of Dyson's insider status as someone who has been grappling on a day-to-day basis with these issues as an investor, industry guru, and chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group concerned with issues of free expression and privacy.

Of course, as an insider Dyson is prone to purvey industry gospel-the free-market nostrums that one critic has called "Silicon Valley orthodoxy." Indeed, Dyson's real thesis is that all of the problems of the digital age can be solved through the "miracle" of the free market. In her first chapter, she tells us "How I got the story and learned to love markets." In this conversion narrative, the young Dyson (daughter of the physicist Freeman Dyson) "grew up scorning the commercial world" (like other benighted academics), went off to Harvard, where she was a "good liberal" who thought that government should help poor people, but finally-through her work at Forbes magazine, as a securities analyst, in the computer industry, and then in post-Communist Russia-came to see that the "magical market worked for people, too" (12, 13, 14).

Or at least for people like her former boss Ben Rosen, who provided seed money for Compaq and Lotus. If, like Dyson, you have spent the past two decades hobknobbing with the people who have made billions in Compaq, Lotus, and Microsoft stock, the market certainly looks pretty "magical." If you watched Christ feed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two small fish or Bill Gates turn a small startup company into a $47 billion personal fortune, you would be likely to become one of the apostles, preaching faith in Christ-or faith in markets-as the solution to all of mankind's problems as well as the more specific problems of Net governance.5

How, Dyson asks, is the Net going to deal with the problem of content that some people deem unacceptable or offensive? Typically she favors a free-market rating system, which users would purchase according to their own predilections. She likes this solution because it "trust[s] the market to sort things out" (191). Equally appealing-but not equally emphasized by Dyson-is that the "problem" of censorship becomes a new opportunity




for profitmaking (and investing in computer startup companies like Net Nanny and Net Shepherd). Voluntary rating systems are probably better than government censorship, but Dyson is overly sanguine about how easily they will work.6 She acknowledges, for example, that a corrupt or sloppy rating service might undermine confidence in the system. But once again there's a market solution-companies will emerge that will rate the raters. And so, while it might be a problem "in the short run," "in the long run ... the market should work" (190). This, of course, overlooks that fact that, historically, companies selling tainted food or dangerous drugs did pretty well in the marketplace; these market failures led to the progressive legislation embodied in agencies like the FTC and the FDA.

Dyson tends to be oblivious not only to the failures of the market, but to the inequalities of power and money that a market system fosters and reinforces. "In the end," she tells us, "everyone" will be on the Net "except for a few holdouts" (52). What about the more than one-third of the residents of poorer nations who are illiterate? Or the two-thirds of the world with no phone service? Are Mexico City slumdwellers or North China peasants obtuse "holdouts" against the lures of the "global society of the connected"(52)? Even within the developed world, the Net raises questions of access and equality that Dyson blithely ignores. Her solution to privacy concerns on the Net are mechanisms that allow you to sell your privacy rights. Dyson admits that "some people object in principle to the concept of privacy as an assignable right" and want it to be an "inalienable right, one the poor can enjoy as fully as the rich." Her answer-"I believe that people should decide for themselves"-ignores the differences in the way a poor person and a rich person might weight this decision. Another one of her pet solutions to the privacy problem-"data intermediaries" who would safeguard your confidentiality online-similarly would mean that the rich are likely to have a great deal more privacy in the online world than the poor. A purely market version of the Net might lead to the same sort of gated communities that now dot the real landscape.

Dyson makes her cheerleading for the market more palatable by her simultaneous insistence on "habits of honesty and generosity" and on the necessity of participation (3). These more social visions find expression in her own unpaid work in post-Communist Russia and her call for people to be "an active member of the communities you join" (283). Yet the seeming acknowledgement that there is more to life than the market is undercut by a fundamentally individualistic vision of life. She is forever exhorting




individuals to act but there is little sense here that there are reasons for groups or movements to form and act or that there are larger goals- religious, political, cultural-that might underpin action on the Net or in the real world.

After Cairncross's and Dyson's relentless optimism, David Shenk's dyspeptic Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut is a breath of fresh air. While Dyson is one of the high priests of the Cult of the Internet (and the market) and Cairncross is one of the acolytes, Shenk is an apostate. And just as Dyson narrates her conversion to the religion of the Net and the market, Shenk describes his abandonment of the gospel of the information age. He tells us how he fervently embraced e-mail, bought each new upgrade for his Macintosh, and signed up for every information service offered only to find ultimate disappointment. The road to truth and enlightenment, he ruefully concludes, does not run down the information superhighway-although that has not stopped him from writing a column for the Microsoft Network or spending hours each day on the Internet.

Shenk's basic complaint is that we now have too much information. "The glut of information," he writes, "no longer adds to our quality of life, but instead begins to cultivate stress, confusion, and even ignorance. Information overload threatens our ability to educate ourselves, and leaves us more vulnerable as consumers and less cohesive as a society" (15). Anyone with too many e-mail messages to read, too many Web sites to check out, or even too many Internet books to review will nod in recognition at Shenk's protest about "information overload." And, at least some parts of that relentless flow of information are clearly unwelcome pollutants-or "data smog." As Shenk points out, between 1971 and 1991, the number of daily advertising messages we encounter increased almost sixfold (from 560 to 3,000); in the 1980s, third-class mail grew thirteen times faster than population. By 1990, Americans faced the nightly assault of 30,000 telemarketing companies employing 18 million Americans.

The sense of irritation may be real, but the problem is not really new. At the turn of the previous century, commentators worried that modern urban life and new commercial amusements like vaudeville were leading to the condition that one social reformer diagnosed as "hyperstimulus."7 While Cairncross and Dyson partake of a recurrent rhetoric of the technological sublime, prophets of doom like Shenk reflect an equally potent tradition of exaggerated alarm in moments of technological innovation and change.

Ironically, Shenk grimly warns readers against precisely the kind of hyperbolic statements that are studded throughout his own book. The




seventh of his thirteen "Laws of Data Smog" (themselves written in the form of headline exaggeration) is that "All high-stim roads lead to Times Square," by which he means that in an information-glutted environment, people respond, raising their voices with "barrier-piercing countermea- sures"(102-3). Having complained about too many raised voices, Shenk proceeds to shout at us. On page 105, he frets about the overuse of "the Nazi reference" as a way of grabbing attention; on page 151, he compares the strategies of consumer data gathering and analysis companies to-what else?-Nazi propaganda techniques.

After devoting three quarters of the book to scare claims, Shenk's concluding section (portentously titled "a return to meaning") offers surprisingly moderate and obvious solutions to the problem-turn off the television, limit your e-mail, leave your cell phone behind, edit your prose, and have the FTC go after consumer fraud. Despite his more critical take on the information age, Shenk-in both his description of the problem and his solutions-seems almost as unconcerned about matters of social and economic inequality as Cairncross and Dyson. The implication of the book is that the main problems of the information age are the psychological stress that it causes for upper middle-class professionals like Shenk, who have cell phones to leave at home.

David Hudson's Rewired: A Brief (and Opinionated) Net History is written with a refreshing lack of hyperbole (and refreshing degree of attention to social and political contexts), which may explain why it has received less attention than the other three books. Indeed, if the book has a theme, it is to reject hyperbole and "get sober" as he calls his first chapter. While Hudson derides the hype and the hyperskeptics, his book has its own quality of lament. He is worried that the "Net's unique many-to-many model of communication" is under assault from a "counterrevolution" that would turn it into something more like broadcast (one to many) and that a populist Internet is becoming a purely corporate and commercial medium (5).

Hudson's populist inclinations lead him to tell the history of the Net from "the bottom up," arguing that ordinary people have shaped the Net's development more than engineers, bureaucrats, or marketers. He points out that even in the earliest days of the Internet-in its guise as ARPANET (its Defense Department-funded predecessor)-research uses "had to share time with messages shooting along the wires that had nothing to do with science or technology whatsoever. Not even the white coats could resist the naturally human appeal of personal e-mail"(18). And he gives prominence




in his short history to the first on-line discussion groups on USENET (Users' Network), which offered "another model of anarchy that works" (22). The real appeal of the new technology, he insists, was "the people-to- people connectivity" (30). He similarly argues that Web will go "nowhere until it gets human" and that e-mail rather than the Web drives the growth of the Internet. "Plain old, low tech ASCII e-mail is the clear favorite of all online applications: the thrill that lasts." And, conversely he worries that "push media," which deliver Web content to your desktop in the manner of a cable program, are "turning the web into television" (48-49).

The serpent that has slithered into this garden of humanity and interactivity that Hudson nostalgically celebrates is of course capitalism. Hudson is smart enough to label his own complaints as "romantic pining for the days when everything about the Net was free and the hierarchy determined by money had not yet been installed online" (53). But, he implicitly argues that the beginning of the end may have come in 1991 when the rules on commerce on the Net were loosened and the "gift economy" was replaced with "the one we're more used to dealing with in the offline world." The threat that Hudson perceives is not the Net as dystopia but simply as "an online mirror of the real world-pretty nice in some spots, pretty horrible in others" (55).

The handmaiden for this "dark future" to the Internet, according to Hudson, is "technolibertarianism"-a tendency that Shenk (in more hyperbolic fashion) also points out. Technolibertarianism, as one critic acidly puts it, "combines historical determinism with hostility to government, big corporations, statutory regulation, taxation or any other restriction on the rights of Stanford alumni to make as much money as they damned well please."8 These anti-statist, free-market views have become, Hudson shows, the official ideology of the Web's most active users as well as its publicists and leading figures, who generally oppose any government regulation of the Internet and (like Dyson) favor market-based solutions to its governance. For example, in 1996, a presidential straw poll conducted on line (and hence drawing mostly cyberenthusiasts) by the left-leaning periodical Mother Jones had Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne in first place with 32 percent.9 This cyberlibertarianism is of course not of a single piece; its more liberal variant is embodied in the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation with its emphasis on issues like free speech and privacy on the Net and its right wing in the anti-statist, free-marketeer Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think-tank with close ties to conservatives like Newt Gingrich and his technological guru, Alvin Toffler.'o




For Hudson, the prime example of technolibertarianism is Wired, the magazine that has most fervently upheld the banner of the digital revolution and whose editor and co-founder, Louis Rossetto, has said:

Look, the question is no longer what sort of statists we should be supporting: Republicans or Democrats, communists or fascists. The question really is what sort of libertarians we should be supporting. ... Central power not only doesn't work, it is not even possible any more."" (Hudson, 174)

Drawing on the work of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron and others, Hudson dissects Wired magazine as the home of the "Californian Ideol- ogy" of "cyberlibertarianism," which marries "the freewheeling hippiocity" of the 1960s with the "freewheeling entrepreneurial zeal" of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s' (190).

Ironically, these cyberlibertarians are living off the fat of massive government intervention and spending, which created the Internet in the first place. This irony is central to an article on "Cyberselfishness" that Paulina Borsook wrote in Mother Jones in 1996. "Just as 19th century timber and cattle and mining robber barons made their fortunes from public resources," she concluded, "so are technolibertarians creaming the profits from public resources."'13 Borsook, who had written for Wired despite her deviation from the technolibertarian party line, liked to call herself "Wired's token feminist/humanist/luddite/skeptic." That was until an interview critical of Wired she did with David Hudson on his "Rewired" Web site led to the cancellation of her book contract with HardWired, the magazine's book publishing outlet.

Hudson's own book gets most problematic and most interesting as he details the insider gossip surrounding Wired and Borsook. Problematic because it becomes too gosssipy and unfocused (and focus is a problem for Hudson throughout-he tends toward writing in cyberbytes rather than in sustained arguments). But it is interesting because it captures something of the insider (and somewhat insular) culture of the Net and also the hypercharged velocity at which Net commentary seems to move-with charges, countercharges, and rumors bouncing around the Net at cyberspeed and hyperlinks sending the reader through the self-referential world of Web publications-from HotWired to Salon to Suck to Feed to Wired Magazine online to Upside.com to Rewired to LiveWired to cinet and then back to HotWired. Borsook's book contract collapsed almost instantly after her interview appeared on the Rewired Web site, and news of the cancellation first appeared (and was debated) soon after in a discussion




forum on Wired magazine's own Web site. Moreover, the insider gossip is extraordinarily public-one can simply enter Borsook's name in a Web search engine and begin working your way through the 509 "hits," including both attacks on her and the defenses of her by her supporters, who have their own fan page. But while anyone can read about Borsook's travails, the small and incestuous community she travels in belies claims about the Internet's universality.

Hudson's book also illustrates the distinctly American (if one may be permitted some national stereotyping) cast of this Net ideology. Pundits like Cairncross and Dyson repeatedly proclaim the global character of the Web, but to date its leading thinkers and ideologists (as well as its largest number of users) have come from the United States. Britons Barbrook and Cameron, who coined the critical term "Californian Ideology," explicitly see themselves in tension with an American world view: "within Europe, it is now necessary for us to assert the necessity for an enlightened mixed economy-rather than to copy the dogmas of the Californian ideologues." The American accent to cyberlibertarianism may explain why efforts to launch Wired Germany and Wired UK have fizzled. In Germany, for example, social-democratic traditions as well as well-founded worries about the links between technology and authoritarianism make Wired's technolibertarianism and technoutopianism hard to accept. Hudson's own long residence in Germany makes him aware that an ideology that is being promoted as the global ideology of the Net is really a much narrower vision that is particularly congenial to a group of Americans who have merged the libertarianism of the counterculture with the free market gospel of business.

Hudson's own insular location in the world of Net pundits and Webmasters makes him exaggerate the "dark future" portended by technolibertarianism. He rightly draws our attention to its popularity in certain computer circles. Yet it would be a mistake to equate the world of Wired magazine for the world of the Internet, where most people are just casually logging on to send email to their grandchildren, buy a book from Amazon.com, or download some pornography. Indeed, even most of Wired's 400,000 readers are probably relatively unaware of the magazine's ideological position.

Moreover, Hudson gets vague when he has to spell out what threats he sees embodied in the dark future of a Net "according to those who would advise us to keep our hands off it" (326). He is also vague when spelling out the alternatives to that dark future; the final section of his book is a




somewhat disjointed discussion of virtual communities and community networking (efforts to develop local networks and respond to local needs using online technology). His sympathies are with these appealing alternatives to an online world of virtual shopping malls, but he seems uncertain about whether these people-based communities can ever be more than a Net sideshow.

Hudson's talk of heading back to the "darker ages of our past" or forward to "a more democratic society of greater equality" rests uneasily against his insistence on "sobriety" about the impact of the Internet. (326) It may be that the most likely outcome will be similar to the one that Claude Fischer reaches about the telephone: "The telephone," he concludes in his social history of America Calling, did not radically alter American ways of life; rather Americans used it to more vigorously pursue their characteristic ways of life."'4

This should not, however, lead us to be complacent. The telephone may not have brought either world peace or the end of civilization, but it did raise some potent political and economic questions about privacy, regulation, monopoly, and universal access. As Dyson's book makes clear, there are similarly real issues about privacy, censorship, and copyright on the Intemet that are being debated daily. Even more important are the questions of access to the new modes of communication and of whether the Net world will be dominated by a small number of giant corporations. As the Net starts to look much like "real life" rather than some fantastic utopia or dystopia, we will need to struggle over the same issues of power and faimesss that trouble us in other areas of society.

Scholars and teachers in American studies and other fields should, in my view, take a particularly active role in such struggles over the future of the Net. We have a large stake, in part because academics have been among the pioneers on the electronic frontier. American studies scholars have taken an especially active part in placing primary cultural documents on the World Wide Web through such sites as "The Valley of the Shadow," "Anti- Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935," and "The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive." On-line exhibits such as "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory" and "Sipapu: The Anasazi Emergence into the Cyber World" have suggested some of the ways that new media can open new ways of presenting cultural history. And the ASA's own Crossroads Project has taken the lead among professional societies in providing a gateway site for scholars in a discipline and in showing how on-line resources can enliven classroom teaching.15




At the same time, however, some scholars have taken a much dimmer view of the electronic future. Some conservatives like Gertrude Himmelfarb see in the free-wheeling spirit of the Web a threat to standards. "Like postmodernism," she complained in the Chronicle of Higher Education two years ago, "the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral." Searches on the Internet "will produce a comic strip or advertising slogan as readily as a quotation from the Bible or Shakespeare. Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is 'privileged' over any other."'6 Some scholars on the political left have discerned the threat in the way that on-line approaches to teaching might undercut traditional modes of teaching and traditional faculty prerogatives and turn universities into "digital diploma mills." In a widely circulated essay, historian of technology David Noble has warned that "the new technology of education, like the automation of other industries, robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, the product of their labor, and, ultimately, their means of livelihood." "A dismal new era of higher education has dawned," Noble concludes. "In ten years, we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it happen."17

As with views of the Internet, in general, scholars should avoid unreflective boosterism or instinctive Luddism. New technologies could narrow access to students with the resources to purchase the latest equipment. And university administrators eager to cut costs or large corporations looking for new arenas for profitmaking could also use new technology for their own ends. But at the same time, new technology opens up the resources of the Library of Congress to students at institutions without extensive libraries and it offers ways for scholars to create their own teaching materials without the mediation of giant publishing con- glomerates. Neither the democratization or the commodification of higher education is inherent in the technology. "New technologies," Phil Agre observes, "create a wider range of institutional possibilities, but precisely for that reason also force us to articulate more deeply the nature and purpose of our work." In that spirit, we need, as he urges, to seize the opportunity to "design institutions that more fully express the values of a democratic society.""18 The future of the Internet and other new communication technologies-whether within the specific realm of education or in




society at large-will be determined by how we act and organize as scholars and citizens.

Acknowledgement

My thanks to Steve Brier, Josh Brown, Deborah Kaplan, and Mike O'Malley for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

NOTES

1. Quotes from 1880 and 1881 Scientific American in Steven Lubar, InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston, 1993), 130, and Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 2 (see also pp. 1,26). Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electrical Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York, 1988) and Graham Rayman, "Hello, Utopia Calling?" in Word (no date) at: http:/ /www.word.com/machine/jacobs/phone/index.html

2. Rossetto quoted in Hudson, Reviewed, 7; Al-Jumhuriya in R. J. Lambrose, "The Abusable Past," Radical History Review 70 (1998): 184.

3. Calvin Reid, "Web Watch," Publisher's Weekly 244 (17 Nov. 1997): 12. 4. "Meet Esther Dyson" at http://www.release2-0.com/meet_esther/interview.html

For Martha Stewart at Kmart, see CNN Grapevine at: http://cnnfn.com/hotstories/ bizbuzz/grapevine/9702/20/kmart_gp/ See also http://www.marthastewart.com

5. Upside.com used to run a daily calculation of Gates's personal wealth; on 4 March 1998, it was $46,709,719,636. See http://www.upside.com

6. For some examples of tensions and problems surrounding the rating services, see, for example, Janelle Brown "Write a Complaint, Get Emailbombed," Wired News, 9 Feb. 1998 at http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/10170.html; Janelle Brown, "Report Takes Aim at Cyber Patrol's Blacklist," Wired News 24 Dec. 1997 at http:// www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/9371.html; and Ashley Craddock, "Is Cybersitter Taking a Naughty Peek?" Wired News 1 July 1997 at http://www.wired.com/ news/news/politics/story/4856.html

7. Ben Singer, "Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism," in, Cinema and the Invention of Modem Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 72-99.

8. Quoted in John Naughton, "Chips with Everything," (London) Times, 22 Nov. 1997. To note the prevalence of libertarian views among Net activists and pundits is not necessarily to argue that the Internet itself is somehow "conservative" or "Republican," as Shenk maintains. It is true, however, that the right has a more substantial presence on the Internet than the left. Compare, for example, the slick and well-funded Web home of conservatism-Town Hall (a gateway and umbrella for conservative sites on the Web)-with its considerably less well developed liberal and radical counterparts. (See http://www.townhall.org/ and compare to http://www.leftwing.com/; http://www.igc.org/ igc/; and http://www.calyx.net/~refuse) Part of the difference may be leftist suspicion of new technology, but the bigger difference is money. The right-not surprisingly




given its vastly greater financial resources-also makes better use of old media like newspapers and magazines.

9. A recent poll by Wired and Merill Lynch Forum found that 95 percent of the "superconnected" (those who exchange email at least three days a week, use a laptop, a cell phone, a beeper, and a home computer) express "some" or "a lot" of confidence in the free-market system compared to 21 percent of the "unconnected." They are also more likely to oppose federal regulation of the Internet, support medical uses of marijuana, and to believe that Bill Gates has a greater impact on America than Bill Clinton. The major limitation of this survey is that does not provide evidence (by using regressions) on to what degree these views are the product of the higher incomes of the "superconnected." Jon Katz, "The Digital Citizen," Wired 5 (Dec. 1996): 68ff.

10. Of course, the two groups share many positions and even some participants. EFF-leader Esther Dyson co-authored the PFF manifesto, "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" along with George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler. See http://pff.org/pff/position.html

11. For a perceptive analysis of Wired, see Langdon Winner, "Peter Pan in Cyberspace: Wired Magazine's Political Vision," Educom 30 (May/June 1995). At http://www.educom.edu/web/pubs/review/reviewArticles/30318.html

12. Barbrook and Cameron's essay has been published in various forms, which are all available at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/media/HRC/ci/calif.html along with several responses and critiques, including one by Louis Rossetto.

13. Paulina Borsook, "Cyberselfish," Mother Jones (July/August 1996) at http:// www.motherjones.com/motherjones/JA96/borsook.html Borsook, and some other critics of "tehcnolibertarianism" have now countered with a call for "Technorealism," which is at http://www.technorealism.org/

14. Fischer, America Calling, 5. 15. These sites can be found at: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/

index.html http://www. rochester.ican.net/fjzwick/ail98-35.html; http://jefferson.village. virginia.edu/whitman/; http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/index.html; http://sipapu. ucsb.edu/; http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/

The recent Crossroads "Expo" provides excellent profiles of most of these projects at http://www. georgetown.edu/crossroads/innovistas/index.html

16. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet," Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Nov. 1996, p. A56.

17. David F. Noble, "Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education," First Monday, 3 (5 Jan. 1998), at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_l/noble/ index.html See also the followup articles by Noble: "Digital Diploma Mills, Part II: The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction" and "Digital Diploma Mills, Part III: The Bloom Is Off the Rose," both of which were forwarded by Phil Agre's excellent "Red Rock Eater News Service." Information on subscribing is at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/ people/pagre/rre.html

18. Phil Agre, "Meet Me at the Crux," Educom Review (May/June 1998), 30. Agre's comments are part of a symposium on "Technology in Education," which focuses on Noble's essay and includes critiques by Ben Schneiderman, Richard Herman, Peter J. Denning, and Agre.



American Quarterly - Book Review

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