Have you just junked your most recent, instantly obsolete, computer? Are you thinking of buying your first computer? Do you find that your business and personal life have been invaded by a bewildering array of electronics--from voice and E-mail to faxes and televisions with hundreds of channels to the wildly hyped Internet and World Wide Web? Do you suffer from info-overload?Do you sometimes think we have lost our souls in a constant quest for speed, entertainment, and convenience?The Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club is a dynamic record of an ongoing meeting of minds from as far away as Tasmania, India, and Austria and as close to home as California and New York. This collection will reveal to you what electronic madness has wrought in our lives and society. Through letters, essays, news clips, poems, cartoons, and testimonials, the members of the Lead Pencil Club suggest how you can restore mindfulness, sanity, and simplicity to your life and the lives of your children.Contributors include Russell Baker, Neil Postman, David Gelernter, Wendell Berry, Sven Birkerts, Mark Slouka, Clifford Stoll, Doris Grumbach, Andre Codrescu, and others, with comments by John Updike, Robert Hughes, Henry David Thoreau, E. Annie Proulx, Alvin Toffler, Dave Barry, Edmund Morris, Farley Mowat, Ted Koppel, Nicholson Baker, Paul Goodman, Gary Snyder, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, plus letters and news items from around the world.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Contributions from such diverse and intelligent voices as Russell Baker, Cliff Stoll, David Gelernter, and Doris Grumbach elevate this collection of essays criticizing our computerized lives above the usual Luddite screeds found in the daily media. Many of the essays are skeptical of cyber-life, but even those of us who use computers constantly can gain insights into how technology may be affecting us in ways that hardly constitute progress.
From Publishers Weekly
Publisher-editor Henderson named his whimsically conceived Lead Pencil Club after the trade of Thoreau's father, a pencil maker. The club quickly won a following for its outspoken antitechnology stance. The members, mostly in a spirit of desperate fun, rebel against much modern gadgetry designed for speed and comfort, but which, they say, is actually depersonalizing human life: voice mail, e-mail, the proliferation of worthless TV, word processors, computer "education"?and, most especially, anything to do with the Internet. The book is a collection of articles, columns, snippets, quotes, Lead Pencil member letters, even a smattering of cartoons. Some of it is, expectably, smug and self-satisfied, but much, particularly by the likes of Neil Postman, Clifford Stoll, David Gelernter and Mark Slouka, is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. There is indeed a quasi-religious mania about some of the claims for the Web, and it's true that this goes ill with what is, after all, an enormous marketing bonanza for software and hardware manufacturers (was Windows 95 really the Second Coming?). For technology skeptics, it's good to have so much informed dissent gathered between covers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Walden Pond Revisited,
By
This review is from: Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Second Thoughts on the Electronic Revolution (Paperback)
I had never known such a book exists until I stumbled upon it at my local bookstore. What surprised me even more was that there is a place for such a club in this world of 1,000 mhz computers and super pocket pcs.It seems ironic that you are actually reading this review on a computer and even more so that this review was written on a pc at my work place. But isn't this book targetted more on computer users than those who never touch a computer? Read the Lead Pencil Club manifesto, it will help you get your life back before it's all too late. Long live the Leadites!
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Voices in the wilderness,
By A Customer
This review is from: Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Second Thoughts on the Electronic Revolution (Paperback)
Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club is an interesting collection of bits and pieces related to the shunning of technology or the minimal use of technology. Electronic gadgets, including computers like the one on which you read this review, are complained about, fretted over, and lampooned. Some of the contributors are techies who have realized the limitations or deficiencies of modern technology over previous methods. Some contributors take after Luddites, wishing to live a simple life. This is a book that may be taken lightly or seriously. This reader found it to be a welcome voice in the wilderness of tech-dom. Using a pencil once in a while won't hurt anyone.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Anti-Technology Pushback at the Dawn of the Mass Digital Age,
By
This review is from: Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Second Thoughts on the Electronic Revolution (Hardcover)
This is a "period piece" and so constitutes a valuable look inside the minds of some thinkers at the time of its writing about a subject that would later be in tremendous flux. Along with Silicon Snake Oil, this book provides rants and screeds directed against the over-marketing of the internet and technology that had started in the early 90s. The viewpoint is dated, but it's an interesting piece of pop culture. Some of the reviews here are criticizing the smugness and ranty flavor of the book. That's the entire point - "we're correct and everyone else is an idiot."
In retrospect many of the authors lacked the vision to see what would happen: pervasive technology has remade society, pretty much as radio and the horseless carriage did. Just as anyone who ranted against autos would have no place to ride their horse in many cities by 1930, you simply can't *function* in modern society today without at least a few minor electronic tethers. One example is employment - you absolutely *must* have an email address to be considered for most employment today, particularly professional employment. Another example is the prevalence of mandatory online use for interaction with most businesses and governmental agencies. It's funny reading a few reacting against faxing as a high-tech accoutrement, and faxes are regarded as retro low-tech today. What the editorial viewpoint of most of the essays fails to consider is that irritating over-marketing and techie geek evangelism may have seemed to be the main enemy of the Luddite, but the real driver of computer use has been one major thing: the lowering of the cost of doing business. Almost any activity is cheaper to administer by computer. So today getting a paper payment check rather than e-payment is starting to be regarded as a "premium" service. And even a Luddite would find today that many aspects of modern life would be far more expensive to be off the communication grid than on. So individuals are pushed extremely hard by the structure of modern society to embrace everything that the book is against. I'd prefer life to be a fusion of older ways of doing things with the availability of greater speed to those who wish to have it, but that's not how things worked out. Just as there was no place for horse and carriage traffic alongside motor vehicles in the US by 1930.
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