Spalpeen

Two of the first books I’ve been recommended to read by Prof. Noel O’Sullivan at Hull:

Gordon Graham’s The Internet - Buy here, read an academic review here. Note that this was published in 1999. The web has changed an awful lot since then.

From the review: ” … even if the Internet is a new world it is not a world unto itself for its members are already members of this, our non-cybernetic, world. The world of the Internet cannot, in short, supplant our world; at most it can grow out of and assume an enormous significance within our world. But its shape and character are determined by, and can be controlled by, the forms our present world choose to assume.” I think this viewpoint (that the internet was never designed to replace reality) has been accepted now. People acknowledge that sites like Facebook only compliment real life activities. Possibly this is why concepts such as Second Life are failing: they seek to emulate the concept of the “3D Internet”, a silly concept where people replace their real physical lives with an artificial world.

Another interesting quote from the review: ” … the worldwide web, for all its puffed social and political ramifications, is principally a world of commercial activity.” I love this quote, because it questions the concept of the web as a force for unequivocal good. Commercial activity is tied inexorably to making money. It’s arguable whether that can ever be “good”, no matter what the optimistic college student CEOs in Silicon Valley think.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire - Buy here. Also first published over 7 years ago in 2000. Interesting review here: ” … the book is a breathtakingly incoherent hash, composed of loopy 1960s utopianism, apologetics for the Soviet Union, paranoia, and sheer blood lust. Neither author appears to have really been prepared to handle a book of this attempted scope.”