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Books we're reading this month
The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace by Vincent Mosco (MIT Press, 2004)
“The rise of cyberspace amounts to just another in a series of interesting, but ultimately banal exercises in the extension of human tools,” writes Mosco, a professor of sociology at Queen’s University. His new book is a direct challenge to those wannabe prophets who believe the internet and related information technologies will create a global utopia. As Mosco points out, this kind of thinking is a tad presumptuous considering that this long after its invention, most citizens of the world don’t even own a telephone.
Not only will the “information superhighway” deliver us from suffering, the digerati tell us, but it will allow us to enter a world free from the grasp of geography, history, or politics. Taking on Francis Fukuyama, neo-liberalism, and writers from Wired and The Economist, Mosco ponders the myths involved in creating and disseminating this pseudo-religious vision of the internet. Most convincingly, Mosco compares these seers with the similar charlatans who foretold how worldwide peace and prosperity would result from the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, cable television, and almost every new communications technology of the last two centuries.
Mosco shows that the techno-prophets of our era are just the latest in a long and boring line of hyperbolic would-be visionaries who think that their generation represents the final stage of human development. “The end is preferred to more of the same,” Mosco explains, “The transcendent to the routine; the sublime to the banal.”
- Chris LaVigne <clavigne@republic-news.org> |
Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003)
The authors of Digital Play, all Canadian media scholars, successfully reveal the paradoxes and hypocrisies that lie behind the sterling façade of the videogame industry and what it represents to our supposedly post-industrial world. While North Americans might get to enjoy an “information economy”--personified by game designers whose work seems to be a form of highly-paid playtime--videogames and other information technologies still owe their existence to industrial production workers from around the world who are paid slave wages.
The book also explores videogames as a form of postmodern culture that seems to confirm the theories of philosophers like Jean Baudrillaud, where we all exist in a universe of simulacra. For videogames, this is as true for the fictional worlds that the games contain as for the massive and devious amount of marketing involved in getting real consumers to buy them. Which world is more fake is hard to tell.
The authors’ insights are provocative and well worth reading. The chapters providing a critical look at the history of the videogame are possibly the best starting point for someone wanting an overview of the medium. The book is hindered, however, by its authors’ gloomy disposition. This pessimism is combined with a demonstrated lack of understanding about the actual content and culture of gaming. The authors see games only as products and ignore the messages and artistry that they can contain. They also choose the most obvious corporate-owned franchises as examples for an industry which, especially with computer games, is far too varied to condense into a few representative titles. Digital Play offers a necessary corrective to the rose-coloured glasses worn by many “information age” capitalists, but it ultimately goes too far in the opposite direction.
- Chris LaVigne <clavigne@republic-news.org>
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Glory and Terror: The Growing Nuclear Danger by Steven Weinberg; Fear and Loathing in George W Bush’s Washingon by Elizabeth Drew, New York Review of Books Publishing, 2004.
The venerable New York Review of Books, with the periodical world’s longest articles, has finally acknowledged the fact by putting out book versions of the best. The books are in the tradition of chapbooks, being soft cover and physically small, but the paper is quality and the design is elegant.
These two editions make the perfect bus ride accompaniment. Weinberg is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and has been awarded the National Medal of Science. The two previously published articles that comprise this volume put in blindingly clear fashion a menace most of us might have been lately overlooking: Soviet-era Russian nuclear arms, and the enormous stockpile of operational American nuclear arms. It is Weinberg’s thesis that the present US administration is talking of developing tactical nukes not because there is any military sense in that application of this technology, but because, like in so many cases throughout history, the new bombs offer an opportunity for personal glory by those who would be entrusted to wield them.
Drew’s three articles gathered in the second volume stand as a handy reference guide to the personalities currently occupying the White House, and more importantly, the shapers and creators of those personalities, the people behind the scenes. Drew shows how a paranoid and disconnected Bush White House has permeated all of Washington, including the Congress and Senate with the poison of bickering and backstabbing that has virtually stalled the normal functioning of a policy-implementing national government.
- Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org> |
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