Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage: Some Recent Literature of Cyberspace

摘要

What is this thing called cyberspace? According to some, we are witnessing the emergence of the global mind: a revolutionary change in human practice of no less import than the invention of printing, or, before it, of language. Most of the contributors to the five books under review here adopt this position—though, like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match has been thrown, they go off dazzlingly, dizzyingly, and often dementedly in different directions from this central starting point. According to another view, more sparsely represented in these works, we are doing much the same sorts of things we have always done but with a new spectacle (in the sense of show) to distract our attention from the material world. Those of us surfing the Web also get bad backs and repetitive strain injury and end up working longer hours for relatively less reward.