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Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Second Thoughts on the Electronic Revolution

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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!

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.

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.

The essays here sound a warning: technology has become our god. Granted, many technologies such as the telephone, water purification plants, airplanes, are given a pass. The main culprit is the computer (and related technologies), which have taken over our consciousness -- lives plugged into the electronic web of Internet, email, "virtual sex", video games, cell phones (and now Twitter, Broadband, Facebook, etc.) We have created a culture that cannot do anything without a computer. Also of grave concern: Databases make privacy nearly impossible.

Yahoo!! At last someone has given credit where credit is due. What a voice in the wilderness. The essays are very good and thought provoking.

This collection of thoughtful and often amusing essays is subtitled, "Pulling The Plug On The Electronic Revolution." Or, perhaps, it is subtitled, "Letters, essays, cartoons and commentary on how and why to live contraption-free in a computer-crazed world." The difficulty in ascertaining the subtitle lies in the fact that both statements are tacked on to the cover (in different typefaces), along with the cute little pencil logo which serves as a pointer throughout the text. The pencil is chiefly used in the sidebar quotations which run adjacent to the main text, and which are also set in varying typefaces to differentiate each from the next. If you are at all familiar with desktop publishing you already see the fatal flaw in Henderson's argument. This book is the product of a computer. I believe I could safely bet the bank that Henderson could not have created his Pushcart Press without the benefit of the machines he urges everyone else to eschew. This lends his effort the self-contradictory stance of a TV series which exhorts viewers to turn off the set. (Tune in next week when we'll tell you fifty ways to kill your Sony!) That said, many of the writers exerpted here have given considerable thought to the impact of the computer on society and possible future ramifications. A frequent observation, and one with which I whole-heartedly agree, is that computers have been oversold as teaching tools. Diversion of money from teachers and books to computers is arguably undermining education, and the same impact is being felt in libraries. (I learned to use a computer in my late thirties without ill effect, and each generation of these gizmos gets easier to use. Kids don't need them. If you want proof, watch kids use them. They are fancy toys, not teachers.) The several author's who decry e-mail as a sorry substitute for hand written letters are way off base however. OF COURSE it is. What these critics miss is that e-mail can actually diminish the tyranny of technology by replacing business phone calls and endless phone-tag, and allowing one to respond in depth and on one's own schedule. The resource-use argument is also ignored and a repeated insistence on the value of paper copies is misguided. I love hand-made cards, hand-written letters, books, magazines and some newspapers but see no virtue in wasting paper on multiple revisions before a final text is created. Pencils, by all means. Pencils! Hey, they even have a "delete" function, which is the biggest benefit of word processing programs. But, Mr. Henderson, your argument would hold a whole lot more weight if you had hired monks to copy this text by hand. (Even the good old-fashioned Gutenberg press was a technological contraption.) And, you should definitely lose the bar-code on the back cover. I know that the Universal Price Code enables efficient distribution and accurate pricing of this tome at bookstores everywhere, but do you really want to make sales which depend on the insidious electronic net? And I see that this book is available n Amazon, which, as far as I can tell, ONLY sells to customers online. Filthy lucre, indeed.

This collection of essays, pull quotes, and cartoons criticizes life with computers and advocates abandoning technology in favor of face-to-face contact and hand-written communication sent by surface mail. Most of the essays do not quote any hard facts to support their positions and instead sound like someone whining about a life with too many demands and not enough time. I doubt that abandoning the computer in favor of a pencil will really bring about the fictional, nostalgic past these people seem to think existed before the technology boom. Instead if inspiring me to join their cause, Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club made me want to respond to these whiny voices with, "Oh, cry me a river."