BEING DIGITAL
Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab

"Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living." Thus writes Nicholas Negroponte in the introduction to his visionary new book, Being Digital. Bits, "the DNA of information," are rapidly replacing atoms as the basic commodity of human interaction. Negroponte shows us the dramatic effects of this change. The difference between a television screen and a computer screen becomes one of mere size. And formerly "mass" media evolves into a personalized two-way street of communication. Information is no longer "pushed" at "consumers." Instead, people or their digital agents "pull" and help create the specific information they need.

The revolution in information in information technolgoy will liberate computers from the confines of keyboards and screens into objects we talk to, drive with, touch, or even wear. These changes will fundamentally alter how we learn, how we work, how we entertain ourselves--in short, how we live.

CYBERSPACE:
First Steps
ed. by Michael Benedikt, University of Texas, Austin

"Essays and musings on one of the most exciting, exotic, and least understood frontiers of computing... The descriptions offered in the book are compelling." -- Peter H. Lewis, The New York Times.
Cyberspace has been defined as "an infinite artificial world where humans navigate in information-based space" and as "the ultimate computer-human interface." However one defines it, this "virtual reality" is clearly both the strangest and most radically innovative of today's computer developments.

The original contributions in this new book take up the philosophical basis for cyberspace in ancient thought, the relevance of the body in virtual realities, basic communications principles for cyberspace, the coming dematerialization of architecture, the logic of graphic representation into the third dimension, the design of a noncentralized system for multiparticipant cyberspaces, the ramifications of cyberspace for future workplaces, and a great deal more.

THE ELECTRONIC WORD:
Democracy, Technology and the Arts
Richard A. Lanham, UCLA

The personal computer has revolutionized the structure of communication, concealing beneath its astonishing versatility and consumer appeal a bold transition to electronic, postmodern culture. Unchecked by the inherent limitations of conventional print, digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges all our assumptions about artistic, educational, and political discourse.

The Electronic Word, Richard Lanham' collection of witty, provocative and engaging essays, explores this challenge. With hope and enthusiasm, Lanham surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters and how they might be taught in a newly democratized society. To those who view electronic text as a cultural catastrophe, he counters that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."

Whether discussing how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of 20th century visual art and music, how it will revolutionize the university curriculum, how it democratizes the expressive instruments of art, or how it poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself, Lanham insists that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not apocalyptic despair.

RESISTING THE VIRTUAL LIFE:
The Culture and Politics of Information
Edited by James Brook and Iain A. Boal

"At last, a defiant radical critique of the information millenium... a burning barricade across the highway to the total surveillance society." -- Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz.
This anthology investigates the connection between information technologies and the increasingly abstract, virtual life that all of us--technophile and Luddite--are now compelled to lead. Scholars, writers, and activists gauge the impact of the new video, computer, and networked communications on our ways of life in a restructured world. Exposing relations of power and dependence, they offer strategies of resistance to the global rewiring of the body and psyche, work and community, literature and art.

James Brook is a poet and translator who lives in San Francisco and labors in Silicon Valley. Iain A. Boal, an Irish social historian of science and technics, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

TECHNOPOLY:
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Neil Postman, New York University

In this book, Neil Postman offers brilliant and forceful arguments about the form and content of American culture. For many historical and social reasons, he warns, the United States is in danger of being a "technopoly," a system in which technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life, and becomes self-justifying, self-perpetuation, and omnipresent.

Postman traces the historical movement of technology from being a support-system for a culture's traditions to competing with them, and, finally, to creating a totalitarian order with no use for tradition at all. As a consequence, alternative ways of living and believing become invisible and irrelevant, and the possibilities of other narratives that might serve to organize national purpose are driven out of consciousness.

Postman examines the specific ways in which technology tyrannizes over everything from medical practice to bureaucracy to politics to religion; he inveighs against the subversion of humane values by misunderstood techniques of information storage, retrieval, and dissemination. Tools and technologies are certainly indispensable to any culture; but, he argues, we must understand and control them, place them in context of our larger human goals, our social values, our national intentions.

THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Howard Rheingold, Ed. Whole Earth Review

The technology news is filled with money as corporate moguls from Hollywood, the cable business, the computer industry, and the telephone companies scramble to exploit America's much ballyhooed "Electronic Superhighway." Suddenly, the interlinked network for computerized communication that grew up quietly on its own is gushing "Infotainment" possibilities. Interactive is the buzz word today, alongside convergence, syberspace, and digital future.

In The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold returns the focus of our attention to people, working back from this commercialized present to the very beginnings of computer-mediated communication, giving us the lay of the land before it was discovered by government and the corporate giants. What he reveals to us is a true electronic frontier of fiercely independent enthusiasts who have created closely knit communities and rich culture on-line.

But while the book is filled with the promise of the ultimate in human development through the global network, Rheingold tempers his enthusiasm with warnings of darker possibilities. The book is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the next wave of human culture as it moves on-line.

WAR OF THE WORLDS:
Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality
Mark Slouka, UC San Diego

Part cultural critique, part call to the ramparts, War of the Worlds is a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace. Chronicling this revolution in the making and some of the key players in the field, Mark Slouka warns us that more is going on than mere on-line communication. We stand now on the threshold of turning life itself into computer code, of transforming the experience of living in the physical world into a product for our consumption.

Whether you're a devoted citizen of cyberspace or the opposite, a PONA (person of no account), you owe it to yourself to join Slouka as he reveals some of the uglier side effects of technological "progress" and offers a compelling argument for reaffirming our connection to the unwired world. After all, even though cyberspace communities already offer everything from tea in fine china to virtual reality games, there may be a few things in "RL" (real life) worth backing up to save.