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

From Cyborg Anthro Wiki

Author

Mark Slouka, is an American writer, born in 1958. He is a graduate of Columbia University, he has taught at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego,[1] where he was a lecturer in literature and culture at the time of writing.[2] He later became a contributing editor at Harper's.[3]

BasicBooks, New York, 1995. 185 pages, with bibliographical references on pages 161 to 185.[4] ISBN 0-465-00486-5.[2]

He has since written mostly fiction and memoir, including Lost Lake, Brewster, and Nobody's Son.[3]

Description

Slouka argues that the perception of reality in America has been radically altered by new technologies, and that the idea of reality as an empirical state shared between people has been the specific casualty.[1]

His account of the mechanism is threefold. As people plug into the Internet, use online services, play simulation games, and explore virtual realities, abstract communication replaces firsthand experience, entertainment becomes spectatorship rather than participation, and ordinary human contact loses value.[3]

Slouka's subject is the digital avant-garde, whom he presents as sophisticated, well funded, and unabashedly messianic, with the technical knowledge and market position to deliver on a substantial share of their predictions.[2] The publisher's framing gives the register: face-to-face communication, F2F to those inside the culture, is being made obsolete, and people are turning to computers for information, entertainment, companionship, and love.[2]

He discusses that universal access to an information superhighway will empower the weak and build community.[3] The second is the digital hive, the vision of countless computer users wired together into a global mind, which he argues betrays a collectivist mentality and a deep distrust of the individual.[3] His summary judgment is that the digital revolution amounts to distraction at scale.[3]

The tone is polemical and often funny, and the book presents itself as a humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace rather than as a technical analysis.[2]

Relevance

Where Haraway treats the dissolution of the boundary between human and machine as an opening, and where Gibson treats cyberspace as a place with its own texture, Slouka treats both as losses that were sold as gains. His argument is not that the technology fails to work. It is that it works, and that what it replaces is not recoverable.

The book is also a document of its own moment. Published in 1995, it names a specific group of promoters and a specific set of promises, and the promises can now be checked. Some of what Slouka predicted did not happen in the form he expected. Some of it happened more completely than he anticipated, and by routes he did not identify.

Criticism

The most common objection is that Slouka is melodramatic and reaches for the strongest available comparison. His juxtaposition of Wired editor Kevin Kelly with the Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is the case most often cited against him.[5] Even readers sympathetic to the argument have noted that comparisons of this order cost him more than they gain.

A second objection is that the book argues against the promoters rather than against the technology, so it lands on the rhetoric of the digital revolution without engaging the systems it describes. Reviewers have characterized the book as a long essay rather than a study.[6]

The book is frequently placed alongside Neil Postman's work, and readers who find Postman persuasive tend to find Slouka persuasive on the same grounds.[5] Its value is as an articulate statement of a position, which is why it remains worth reading even where it is wrong.[5]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 War of the Worlds, Google Books.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 War of the Worlds, first printing, Ground Zero Books via AbeBooks.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 War of the Worlds review, Publishers Weekly.
  4. ↑ War of the worlds: cyberspace and the high-tech assault on reality, Internet Archive.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 War of the Worlds, reader review, Amazon.
  6. ↑ War of the Worlds, reader review, Amazon.
Retrieved from "https://cyborganthropology.com/index.php?title=War_Of_The_Worlds:_Cyberspace_And_The_High-tech_Assault_On_Reality&oldid=7109"