Customer Reviews

Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Explorations of Computing as a Social Practice

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With the benefit of some 9 years passing since the book was written, we can see that it touches on useful ideas. Some of which have blossomed into far greater form than was known by the book's authors. Take the book's discussion of MUDs. Then primarily text based. But given continuing trends in cheaper memory, faster cpus and better bandwidth, MUDs have morphed into mass multiplayer online role playing games. With the biggest instantiations probably being in South Korea, Japan and China. As opposed to the early MUDs, which were mostly in the US. The MMORPGs are now big business, with revenues in the millions of dollars. The idea of a role playing game community has also led to people making their livings in those environments, by building characters and selling these.

Then, considering community networks, in the book you might see glimmerings of the blog phenomenon. Or the various activist websites that blossom around election time.

Overall, at this time of writing, 2006, there are far richer examples of social computing, broadly defined, than as recently as 1997. The book's examples already seem so constrained. But it can be read as a pretty good analysis, given the material it knew.