http://www.sfgate.com/net/rheingold/1101.html

Technology criticism, ethics and you

HOWARD RHEINGOLD

Wednes, Nov. 1, 1995

EVEN ENTHUSIASTS - especially enthusiasts - ought to skeptically 
examine the  objects of our enthusiasms. I had been waiting for 
a wave of anti-Internet  books. From the look of the first wave, 
recently arrived, I hope the second  wave is better. 

Clifford Stoll's best-selling "The Cuckoo's Egg" was the first-
person  account of the detection, stalking and capture of a KGB-
sponsored  computer-cracker. "The Cuckoo's Egg" moved forward 
because it was a gripping  story of intellectual detective work. 
And the book carried an important  ethical message concerning 
the way we use technology. Computer networks,  Stoll eloquently 
pointed out, are built on trust. If too many people break  into 
too many computers, and too many people begin to mistrust the 
medium,  global many-to-many communication will lose its value. 

Stoll's current effort, "Silicon Snake Oil," is again 
autobiographical, but  this time, there is no story, just a 
theme: Computer and on-line enthusiasts  should turn off our 
computers and get a life. Certainly he's correct, but  only in 
regard to a small proportion of the on-line population. 

Stoll raises important questions about the way many people abuse 
their  enthusiasm for the cyber-life, and his plea to unplug is 
one worth making. But when Stoll began to resort to sweeping 
generalizations that could cause  people some harm, he lost me. 
For the Alzheimer's disease and AIDS  caregivers who find on-
line support, and for the infirm, disabled, elderly  or just 
plain frightened people who rarely leave their apartments after  
dark, the Internet is a lifeline. 

Certainly, we should look at inflated claims of technological 
utopia with a  skeptical eye, but unless one is gifted with 
omniscience, I don't see what  qualifies any mortal to judge the 
quality of another person's life. 

I sometimes despair when I find it hard to get my 20-year-old 
friend Justin,  an intelligent, informed and deeply wired guy, 
to read entire books. My  underlying suspicions that on-line 
media are changing the way we think set  me up to become 
enthralled by "The Gutenberg Elegies," Sven Birkerts'  romantic 
description of the rich virtual realities that enthusiastic  
book-readers create in our heads, and which are now threatened 
by the  neo-barbarism of words on screens. Yes, words on screens 
are different from  words on paper, and I agree, reading words 
in a traditional book is a  different kind of experience. But 
there are reasons, not all of them evil,  why the Net is the 
fastest-growing communication medium in history. 

My enthusiasm for Birkerts' paeans to the glories of book-
reading faded when  it became clear that the author didn't 
understand the technology he was  criticizing. Birkerts' perhaps 
justifiable revulsion at and rejection of  reading words on 
screens made him blind to the attractions and some of the  
strengths of the technology he rejects. 

"Resisting the Virtual Life," edited by James Brook and Iain A. 
Boal (1995,  City Lights Books), is an anthology focused on 
political analysis of new  communications technologies. Not all 
the contributors hit the mark, and you  need to adjust for each 
author's political biases, as always, but the  anthology does 
something Stoll and Birkerts fail to do. Zeroing in on the  hard 
realities of political power behind the scenes of the mass-media  
spectacle, the authors get at some of the questions citizens 
ought to be  asking ourselves:

Is the "rhetoric of the technological sublime" blinding 
enthusiasts to the  dark side of communication technology? Is 
the price of progress ultimately  going to be a kind of 
enslavement to the mechanical world we've created? Are  the 
technologies we now embrace likely to lead to the loss of 
privacy,  increasing government or commercial control of our 
thoughts and bodies,  constraints on our freedom of expression 
and choice?  If you embrace the virtual life, don't do it 
mindlessly; read what the best 
critics have to say.

For clarity of vision and communication, Lewis Mumford's 1967 
classic, "Myth  of the Machine," is still the place to start. 
"Resisting the Virtual Life"  updates the technological 
background. I'm still waiting for someone to get  the big 
picture on the ways our machines are remolding our minds.  You 
can reach Howard Rheingold, author of "The Virtual Community" 
(HarperCollins, 1994), via e-mail: future@well.com.

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