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Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST. 56(2003) no.12, S.1360 (C.Tomer): "Humanizing Information Technology is a collection of essays that represent what are presumably Julian Warner's best efforts to understand the perpetually nascent discipline of information science and its relationship to information technology. It is clearly a formidable task. Warner succeeds occasionally in this endeavor; more often, he fails. Yet, it would be wrong to mark Humanizing Information Technology as a book not worth reading. On the contrary, though much fault was found and this review is far from positive, it was nevertheless a book well-worth reading. That Humanizing Information Technology succeeds at all is in some ways remarkable, because Warner's prose tends to be dense and graceless, and understanding his commentaries often relies an close readings of a wide array of sources, some of them familiar, many of them less so. The inaccessibility of Warner's prose is unfortunate; there is not a single idea in Humanizing Information Technology so complicated that it could not have been stated in a clear, straightforward manner. The failure to establish a clear, sufficiently füll context for the more obscure sources is an even more serious problem. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this problem stems from the frequent examination of the concept of the "information society" and the related notion of information as an autonomous variable, each of them ideas drawn largely from Frank Webster's 1995 book, Theories of the Information Society. Several of Warner's essays contain passages in Humanizing Information Technology whose meaning and value are largely dependent an a familiarity with Webster's work. Yet, Warner never refers to Theories of the Information Society in more than cursory terms and never provides a context füll enough to understand the particular points of reference. Suffice it to say, Humanizing Information Technology is not a book for readers who lack patience or a thorough grounding in modern intellectual history. Warner's philosophical analyses, which frequently exhibit the meter, substance, and purpose of a carefully crafted comprehensive examination, are a large part of what is wrong with Humanizing Information Technology. Warner's successes come when he turns his attention away from Marxist scholasticism and toward historical events and trends. "Information Society or Cash Nexus?" the essay in which Warner compares the role of the United States as a "copyright haven" for most of the 19th century to modern China's similar status, is successful because it relies less an abstruse analysis and more an a sharply drawn comparison of the growth of two economies and parallel developments in the treatment of intellectual property. The essay establishes an illuminating context and cites historical precedents in the American experience suggesting that China's official positions toward intellectual property and related international conventions are likely to evolve and grow more mature as its economy expands and becomes more sophisticated. Similarly, the essay entitled "In the Catalogue Ye Go for Men" is effective because Warner comes dangerously close to pragmatism when he focuses an the possibility that aligning cataloging practice with the "paths and tracks" of discourse and its analysis may be the means by which to build more information systems that furnish a more direct basis for intellectual exploration.
Like Daniel Bell, the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), who used aspects of Marx's thinking as the basis for his social forecasting models, Warner uses Marxist thought as a tool for social and historical analysis. Unlike Bell, Warner's approach to Marx tends to be doctrinaire. As a result, "An Information View of History" and "Origins of the Human Brain," two of the essays in which Warner sets out to establish the connections between information science and information technology, are less successful. Warner argues, "the classic source for an understanding of technology as a human construction is Marx," and that "a Marxian perspective an information technology could be of high marginal Utility," noting additionally that with the exception of Norbert Wiener and John Desmond Bernal, "there has only been a limited penetration of Marxism into information science" (p. 9). But Warner's efforts to persuade the reader that these views are cogent never go beyond academic protocol. Nor does his support for the assertion that the second half of the 19th century was the critical period for innovation and diffusion of modern information technologies. The closing essay, "Whither Information Science?" is particularly disappointing, in part, because the preface and opening chapters of the book promised more than was delivered at the end. Warner asserts that the theoretical framework supporting information science is negligible, and that the discipline is limited even further by the fact that many of its members do not recognize or understand the effects of such a limitation. However cogent the charges may be, none of this is news. But the essay fails most notably because Warner does not have any new directions to offer, save that information scientists should pay closer artention to what is going an in allied disciplines. Moreover, he does not seem to understand that at its heart the "information revolution" is not about the machines, but about the growing legions of men and women who can and do write programming code to exert control over and find new uses for these devices. Nor does he seem to understand that information science, in the grip of what he terms a "quasi-global crisis," suffers grievously because it is a community situated not at the center but rather an the periphery of this revolution."

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Footnote

Rez. in: Publishers Weekly. May 2007: "In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break-they're already breaking-in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about "the third order of order" and "useful miscellaneousness." But the book's call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about "the newly miscellanized world.""

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Abstract

According to Paul Levinson, it would be improper to portray information technology as the cause of change in our world. However, Levinson clarifies that its role in enabling change can hardly be overestimated. He also points out--through riveting examples--that inventions have unintended consequences and uses. Why is it, for example, that the move from polytheism to monotheism failed when attempted by the pharaoh Ikhnaton, yet took solid root among the Hebrews who were taken out of Egypt by Moses only about 150 years later? Levinson argues that communication technology played a key role: The awkward Egyptian hieroglyphics failed to carry the ideology as well as the Hebrew alphabetic system. From there, Levinson examines the early social changes that became possible because of what the author calls "the first digital medium"--the alphabet. He considers how the Reformation, economic and political movements, and the scientific revolution were largely enabled by the printing press. He then discusses the influence of photographic communications and electronic technology such as the telegraph, the telephone, and broadcasting. Levinson devotes the second half of the book to our present digital revolution, from word processing to the Internet and beyond. One of his key points is that new technology doesn't necessarily displace the old so much as it expands it. Therefore, he doesn't see any end to using paper anytime soon. However, he sees great need for changes in the way we view creative rights. He proposes what he calls an"electronic watermark" for intellectual property--a universal patent number that will be embedded in intellectual property and will notify users in any medium of the property's creators. Levinson puts forth his ideas in a manner that is both formal and engaging. He has a knack for making his reader feel intelligent and respected--and never more so than when he looks at issues of ethics and a speculative future.

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Abstract

Does contemporary Internet technology strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice? The recent surge in online community participation has become a cultural phenomenon enmeshed in ongoing debates about the health of American civil society. But observations about online communities often concentrate on ascertaining the true nature of community and democracy, typically rehearsing familiar communitarian and liberal perspectives. This book seeks to understand the technology on its own terms, focusing on how the technological and organizational configurations of online communities frame our contemporary beliefs and assumptions about community and the individual. It analyzes key structural features of thirty award-winning online community websites to show that while the values of individual autonomy, egalitarianism, and freedom of speech dominate the discursive content of these communities, the practical realities of online life are clearly marked by exclusivity and the demands of commercialization and corporate surveillance. Promises of social empowerment are framed within consumer and therapeutic frameworks that undermine their democratic efficacy. As a result, online communities fail to revolutionize the civic landscape because they create cultures of membership that epitomize the commodification of community and public life altogether.

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Classification

323.44/5 22 (GBV;LoC)

DDC

323.44/5 22 (GBV;LoC)