IP: Dyson, Cairncross, and Spretnak books

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

\
From: Richard Mateosian <srm () cyberpass net>
Subject: Dyson, Cairncross, and Spretnak books 


Hi, Dave -


IPers might be interested in my review of recent books by Esther Dyson,
Frances Cairncross, and Charlene Spretnak. This material is excerpted from
my column in IEEE Micro. If you distribute it, please include the following
notice:


          Another version of this review appeared in the
          January-February 1998 issue of _IEEE Micro_


Thanks.  ...RM


***************************************
Books about Trends


I read three interesting books that seek to make sense of our technological
society and help us see where it's headed. Two of the authors are
enthusiastic about where technology is taking us. The third sees growing
reaction to and refutation of some of technological society's underlying
assumptions.




Release 2.0 -- A Design for Living in the Digital Age by Esther Dyson
(Broadway Books, NY, 1997, 318pp, ISBN 0-7679-0011-1, $25.00)


For more than twenty years, Esther Dyson has lived and worked at the center
of the personal computer and telecommunication revolutions. She is a
journalist, conference organizer, analyst, entrepreneur, and informal
ambassador. Because they respect and trust her, heads of industry and
government seek her advice and counsel. She doesn't have to knock on doors
to find out what's happening -- people who know what's happening compete
for her attention.


Release 2.0 is a thoroughly accessible book. Most teenagers can probably
read it without difficulty. It is, nonetheless, an informative book. Most
readers -- even the most technologically aware -- will find new information
or unexpected viewpoints.


Dyson perceives and seeks to fill a need for guidance about "the Internet
and our roles as citizens, rule makers, and community members." You can
think of her book as a seventh grade social studies textbook for the
digital age. Fortunately, Dyson is better informed, better organized, more
intelligent, and more free from outside pressure than the typical social
studies textbook author. Her book is lively and interesting.


You can also think of Dyson's book as an attempt at large scale personal
mentoring. The most gratifying review compliment I ever received about my
books was from an aspiring young programmer who said "I felt like the
author was sitting beside me when I read Inside BASIC Games." I think many
young readers will feel that way about Dyson's book. She writes in the
first person, talks about her personal life and history, and, most
importantly, makes herself vulnerable. She displays what she explicitly
encourages: courage, openness, disclosure, identity.


Esther Dyson has strong opinions. At the same time, she exhibits detached
objectivity and fairness -- not just in this book, but in her other public
pronouncements. When she talks about subjects like questionable content,
unsolicited email, encryption, or Microsoft -- topics that often generate
more heat than light -- she sidesteps the rhetoric and gets to the issues.


Then she states her opinions.


In laying out a design for living in the digital age, Dyson addresses nine
areas: communities, work, education, governance, intellectual property,
content control, privacy, anonymity, and security. We've heard a great deal
about these subjects. Dyson gives overviews of the issues, talks about
promising approaches to the associated problems, and shows how it all might
work in 2004. Dyson's scenarios for 2004 are pretty lame science fiction,
but they are concrete and well grounded in technological reality. They
communicate in a way that facts alone can't.


Dyson closes her book with a set of design rules for living. I won't list
them out of context. Many were good rules before anyone ever heard of the
Internet -- "always make new mistakes" for example. Some have entirely new
significance. For example, you've probably received email warning you about
the Good Times virus or asking you to send postcards to dying children. The
normally sensible people who forward such messages need to remember Dyson's
rule "use your own judgment."


This book is an easy read. Everyone should read it.






The Death of Distance -- How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our
Lives by Frances Cairncross (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1997,
320pp, ISBN 0-87584-806-0, 888-500-1016, $24.95)


Frances Cairncross is a senior editor on the staff of the Economist, where
she has worked since 1984. In recent years she specialized in
communications and media.


The Death of Distance explores the consequences of the premise that
geography, borders, and time zones will soon be nearly irrelevant to the
way we conduct our personal and business lives. Cairncross starts with
thirty pithy predictions (she calls them developments to watch) and spends
the rest of the book exploring them in the contexts of telephone,
television, the Internet, commerce, competition, regulation, society,
culture, people, government, and countries.


While this book seems to cover the same ground as Esther Dyson's the two
books are quite different. While Dyson concerns herself with how individual
readers can live in the digital age, Cairncross focuses mostly on
technologies, business strategies, and government action. While Dyson maps
the surface of the digital age, Cairncross takes core samples at
interesting places.


Cairncross's predictions are interesting and largely believable --
especially since many of them have already begun to come true. For example,
she believes that companies will adopt the model of Hollywood studios --
bringing in top stars at high prices for specific projects. I think she's
right about that. She predicts a worldwide leveling of wages, and that too
has already begun to happen. She predicts the rise of English as a global
second language and the simultaneous strengthening of less widespread
languages and cultures. Again, these things are already happening.


I don't entirely agree with Cairncross's prediction that email will lead to
better writing skills. Email is asynchronous, that is, non-interactive, and
it is written. The fact that it is asynchronous won't go away, so perhaps
that will force people to express themselves more clearly and completely.


The requirement that it be written is already disappearing. People who
dislike written communication may soon be able to communicate
electronically by voice and gesture instead. In any event, being forced to
do something doesn't guarantee excellence -- or even improvement.   


Cairncross's predictions about company size ring true: more minnows with
scarce resources but global reach; more giants offering high-quality local
services. On the other hand, her predictions about social and political
issues seem naive to me. I think that the outcomes she predicts will
instead be influences -- competing with many other social and technological
influences to produce outcomes that no one can yet predict. For example,
she predicts that we will have little true privacy and little unsolved
crime. I say maybe so, maybe not.


This reservation aside, I think Cairncross has written an important book.
It is well researched and thorough, and it covers the ground. I recommend it.






The Resurgence of the Real -- Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern
World by Charlene Spretnak (Addison Wesley, Reading MA, 1997, 286pp, ISBN
0-201-53419-3, $22.00)


Charlene Spretnak comes out of a very different tradition from the other
two authors featured in this column, but she is just as deep a thinker.
Over the last twenty years she has written about the women's spirituality
movement, green politics, and a cosmological basis for comparative
religion. In each case she found an overarching framework to help herself
and her readers understand the subject. These frameworks, she claims, are
not her inventions. Rather, their inherent coherence, wisdom, and healing
potential led her to discover and embrace them.


In The Resurgence of the Real, Spretnak applies this same technique to
various social trends of the 1990s. In doing so she provides a strong
counterpoint to the other two books in this column. While the disembodied
citizen of cyberspace represents the ultimate evolution of rationality,
Spretnak sees growing signs of reaction to this and other manifestations of
modernity's mechanistic world view.


Spretnak begins her analysis as follows. I've shortened it for reasons of
space, so imagine that the text is sprinkled with ellipses:


[BEGIN QUOTE]
We are told that the world is shrinking, that vast distance has been
conquered by computer and fax, and that the Earth is now a global village.
It feels, however, as if distancing and disconnection are shaping modern
life. If anything is shrinking, it is the fullness of being experienced by
the modern self.


For most people today the web of friends, nearby family members, and
community relationships is a shrunken fragment of what previous generations
experienced. "Leisure time" is now spent at a second, low-paying job or in
a numbed state of recuperation alone in front of a television.
[END QUOTE]


This sounds pretty depressing, but Spretnak is an optimist. She immediately
cites signs of hope: alternative medical therapies, complexity theory, and
independence movements. These are examples of the resurgence, respectively,
of body, nature, and place, the components of what Spretnak calls "the real."




This is an academic book, and, not being an academic myself, I jumped
immediately to the appendix, in which Spretnak spells out the system of
beliefs, assumptions, and ideologies that social scientists call modernity.
She calls the appendix Modernity is to Us as Water Is to a Fish. She means
that we don't even notice -- let alone question -- these ideas, because
they seem natural to us. In my case at least, she's pretty much right about
that.
Spretnak spends a great deal of the book exploring the roots of modernity
and the absorption or marginalization of schools of thought that opposed
it. It's a fascinating story.


Her final chapter, Embracing the Real, contains a utopian, or at least
optimistic, vision of the future in the form of a time-traveler story.
William Morris, an actual nineteenth century writer who resisted modernity
and who wrote time-traveler stories, visits the world of 2024, where he is
a hero. Body, nature, and place figure prominently in this world. Computers
do not.


Morris is fascinated by two shallow arches, side by side, leading only into
the brick wall of a school building. The inscription over them says
"Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here." His guide explains "Those are our
Bill Gates. The faculty designed them as an irreverent monument to
computerized education -- which was actually used in elementary schools
back in the 1990s!"


I don't know if I agree with everything Spretnak says, but this is a good
book. I'm glad I read it, and I hope you read it too.
********************************************




Richard Mateosian <srm () cyberpass net>               
Review Editor, IEEE Micro                       Berkeley, CA


(C) Copyright 1998.  All rights reserved.