Customer Reviews

War Of The Worlds: Cyberspace And The High-tech Assault On Reality

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This book reads very quickly. Mark Slouka's writing style easily holds my attention to the end. Unfortunately he sacrifices depth of analysis for interesting rhetoric. This timely topic needs more thought and I think this book comes up way too shallow. Slouka's excellent writing abilities here seems to indicate that he could have taken more time and thought and come up with a better, more insightful book. He tries to steer a thoughtful middle course between technophilia and luddism, but I don't think that he really found it.

Instead he clangs a lot on the rhetorical bells with a message that essentially comes down to, "pull your head out of cyberspace and live in the real world!" coupled with some vague paranoia about the "digerati's" plans for us. While that might grab the attention briefly, the realities of these issues come out as far more complex -- not every cyberspace junkie spends their time in MUUDs and in some cases cyberspace provides as much competition as encouragement for television watching. I know plenty of cybernauts who never watch any television at all. He did make some vague attempts at the end to tie this all down to some philosophy of essentialism, though he didn't elaborate much except to throw the words around rhetorically.

I take Slouka's concerns seriously and share them. I recommend his book to the extent that he talks about things we all should talk about and also because the book reads quickly and easily without coming across like Mickey Mouse. But I find myself still waiting for the thoughtful alternative vision to unmitigated technophilia and outright luddism. The read seemed great while it lasted but left me ultimately unsatisfied and pretty much back where I started. Maybe it will inspire someone to do a more thoughtful analysis of these issues.

It's fascinating to return to Mark Slouka's prescient words some 15 years later -- a lifetime, maybe 2 or 3, in the advancement of digital technology & its world. Or is it really advancement? That was the question then, and it's even more pressing today, when the digital has become the unnoticed sea in which we all swim. Those who are old enough remember a pre-digital world; those born into it have never known anything else. It truly is their everyday reality now.

These days there are more books written & published about the negative effects of the digital world -- although they tend to preach to an ever-decreasing choir, alas. The lure of the online is just too powerful for most people, too satisfying, too addictive. Attention spans shorten, depth of understanding dries up like a puddle in summer, and everyone lets the Web do their thinking for them.

But as Slouka pointed out in 1996, there are those who would like sentience itself to migrate to the Web. Already some technophiles rhapsodize about the possibilities of digital immortality, of somehow transferring their consciousness to computers & achieving a sort of eternal life, freed of the flesh, almost angelic, translated to a digital paradise wherein they can indulge their every fantasy -- forever. Far-fetched? Not to many, who not only find such a prospect quite possible, but incredibly desirable.

As someone once said, the danger isn't that computers will learn to think like us, but that we'll learn to think like them. No question but that the digital world is a powerful tool! The question is, are we using that tool for human purposes, or we adapting (or crippling) ourselves to live in the digital world at the expense of our humanity? At the very least, it's a sobering question to be pondered at length, before surrendering to the Web entirely. Slouka presents that question clearly & urgently. We would do well to stop & think about it -- with our own brains, rather than Googling it.

Highly recommended for the thoughtful human being!

Read this book and any book by Postman. IT's quick read, a little repetitive, but you'll learn a lot just from the stories he tells. I think he is exaggerating the effects of all this technology a little bit, but his points are valid. Comments about people thinking they are "gods" over nature or cyring about the death of their virtual reality fish; this is a major heads up. He comments about teople who aren't enjoying nature anymore by choice and who are plugged in to the net for days at a time.

The WAR OF THE WORLDS, a not very original title, is a long essay with forebodings of a dystopian ending to the computer revolution. It is a critique of the cyberist or digerati world view. In short, Slouka doesn't like where the digital revolution is heading. There were a few good metaphors presented: Reality has the maximum bandwidth and the goal of digerati is to maximize the broad-band width of cyberspace. These computer fanatics want to generate a virtual reality indistinguishable from real life. So Slouka calls all these computer-TV generated images harmful illusions.

Has he thought this thesis out? If his imagination is so great, how can illusion be so harmful? Is a walk through the digital, virtual, fake, projected park so different from a walk through a real park? He wants to value events generated by the human senses, by the body's chemical detector-projectors, far above those illusions generated by digital-electronics. Slouka fails to show why the solid ground one walks on is any different from virtual ground, if that can be made to feel solid too. His cry into Thoreau's Walden cave has no echo.

The only reason I'm reading this book is for school reading. Otherwise, I would have put it down a long time ago. It's just the author venting about his dislike for technology and how he thinks that it's going to destroy mankind as we know it. I realized that the computer boom has its bad side effects, but Slouka takes it to the extreme, and her repeats the same thing over and over again. I don't find much value in his book except for disagreeing with him. Please, spare yourself.