Critical Reflections on Information Technology

General Critique of Information Technology
Critique of IT in Higher Education
IT Portrayed in the Arts

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General Critique of Information Technology

See also Politics and Sociology of IT and "Future History" of IT (Predictions, Prophecies, Etc.)

• Stanley Aronowitz, "Technology and the Future of Work," in Bender and Druckrey (1994), pp. 15-29
• Daniel Bell, "The Social Framework of the Information Society," in M. Dertouzas and J. Moses, eds. The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 163-211
• Gretchen Bender and Timothy Drucker, ed., Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Seattle, WA: Bay, 1994)
• Wendell Berry, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," in Albert H. Teich, ed., Technology and the Future, 6th ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1993): 66-68
• Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994)
  1. Dean Blobaum (U. Chicago Press), Review of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age (1995)
• Paulina Borsook, "Cyberselfish" (1996) ("Although the technologists I encountered [in Silicon Valley] were the liberals on social issues I would have expected (pro-choice, as far as abortion; pro-diversity, as far as domestic partner benefits; inclined to sanction the occasional use of recreational drugs), they were violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation") (Mother Jones Interactive)
• James Brook and Iain A. Boal, ed., Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights, 1995)
• Chris Carlsson, with Mark Leger, ed., Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology (New York / London: Verso / New Left, 1990) (writings and graphics from the San Francisco/Bay Area Processed World magazine, which in the 1980s followed up on the previous decade's New Left and anarchist movements by advocating anti-business and anti-IT critique, satire, sabotage, pranks, and slack; takes the viewpoint of the clerical underclass of the corporate order)
• Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Malden, Mass. / Oxford: Blackwell, 1996-98) (monumental trilogy that studies the information revolution in the context of global economic and social-political history; particularly focussed on the international sweep of postindustrial "networked" economies and the antithetical rise of communitarian or fundamentalist religious, ethnic, territorial, national identities among world populations marginalized by the new economy)
  1. I. The Rise of Network Society (1996)
  2. II. The Power of Identity (1997)
  3. III. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol. 3, End of Millennium
• Christopher Dede, "Educational and Social Implications" [of Information Technology], in Forester, pp. 242-57 ("Coupled with this faster rate of societal change will be an increasing homogenization of different nations and cultures. As the centralization of production grows, instructional units will become ever more standardized; whatever cultural differentiation takes place in programming to adapt to different audiences may be as much 'window dressing' as actual")
• Gidget Digit, "Sabotage: The Ultimate Video Game," in Carlsson and Leger (1990), pp. 59-66 (the Processed World article on why and how to sabotage office information technology that got "Gidget Digit" fired; builds a rationale for worker pranks, theft, and "subversion" instead of neo-Luddite "mass destruction" of technology)
• Stephen Doheny-Farina, The Wired Neighborhood (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1996)
• Tom Forester, ed., The Information Technology Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)
• Barbara Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past (1988; rpt. NewYork: Penguin, 1989)
• David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology (BasicBooks / Perseus, 1998) ("This book explains how beauty drives the computer revolution: how lust for beauty and elegance underpinned the most important discoveris in computational history. . . ," p. 1)
• Todd Gitlin, "The Liberal Arts in an Age of Info-Glut" (1998) ("When information piles up higgledy-piggledy -- when information becomes the noise of our culture -- the need to teach the lessons of the liberal arts is urgent.") (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Joan Greenbaum, Windows on the Workplace: Computers, Jobs, and the Organization of Office Work in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995)
• M.B. Haug, "Computer Technology and the Obsolescence of the Concept of Profession," in Work and Technology, ed. M.R. Haug and J. Dofny (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977), pp. 215-28
• Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: harperEdge / HarperCollins, 1997)
  1. Excerpt published in Feed
• Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (details the infamous "missing" economic productivity of investment in IT; links lagging productivity with fundamental problems in the process of designing IT for usefulness and usability) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996)
• Brian D. Loader
  1. ed., Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Policy in the Information Society (London, New York: Routledge, 1998)
  2. ed., The Governance of Cyberspace: Politics, Technology and Global Restructuring (London, New York: Routledge, 1997)
• Luddites and Neo-Luddism (see Suggested Readings: IT and the Academy: Idea of Technology: Luddism)
• Michael Marien, "Some Questions for the Information Society," in Forester (1985), pp. 648-60
• Dinty W. Moore, The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin, 1995)
• Mark Poster (Home Page)
  1. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990)
  2. The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995)
• Gregory J.E. Rawlins, Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
• Remembering the Memex: A FEED Document on Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" ("we have reprinted major passages from Bush's original essay, with hypertext annotations from a panel of leading writers and critics, including hypertext pioneer Michael Joyce, Release 1.0's Esther Dyson, and Wen Stephenson, editor of The Atlantic Monthly's Web site, Atlantic Unbound")
• Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997)
• Andrew Ross, "The New Smartness," in Bender and Druckrey (1994), pp. 329-41
• Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1986; rev. ed. 1994)
• Michael Shallis, The Silicon Idol: The Micro Revolution and Its Social Implications (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984)
• David Schenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (New York: HarperSanFrancisco / HarperCollins, 1997)
• William J. Mitchell, City of Bits : Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)
• Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (New York: Basic, 1995)
• Bruce Sterling, "Unstable Networks," in Kroker and Kroker, 1997, pp. 25-37 (witty, hard-hitting critique of information society by one of the original cyberpunk authors)
• Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (New York: Doubleday, 1995)
• Technorealism.org ("As technorealists, we seek to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism. We are technology 'critics' in the same way, and for the same reasons, that others are food critics, art critics, or literary critics. We can be passionately optimistic about some technologies, skeptical and disdainful of others. Still, our goal is neither to champion nor dismiss technology, but rather to understand it and apply it in a manner more consistent with basic human values")
  1. "Technorealism: An Overview"
  2. Technolrealism Bibliography (includes both online and print works)
  3. Related:
     • "A Benign Declaration Treated as Revolutionary" (1998) (article on technorealism; requires free subscription) (New York Times on the Web)
     • Michael Kinsley, "Goldilocks in Cyberspace" (1998) (commentary on technorealism) (Slate)
     • Steven Levy, "Glorifying the Obvious," Newsweek, March 30, 1998, p. 74 (commentary on technorealism)
     • R.U. Sirius, "TechnoSurrealism: Today's Trendiest Cyberthing" (1998) ("Forget Technorealism. Realism without imagination is mere reductionism. Realism is not a realistic response to accelerating change. . . . while tenured academics might dream of slowing this digital demon down that it might be parsed in a spirit of Amish-like rectitude, there is no solid ground upon which to examine the corpus of current techno-sociopolitical reality")
• Sherry Turkle (Home Page)
  1. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995)
  2. "Tough Love: An Introduction to Françoise Dolto's When Parents Separate"
  3. "Who Am We?" ("We are moving from modernist calculation toward postmodernist simulation, where the self is a multiple, distributed system") (HotWired)
• Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997)
• Langdon Winner (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects for Community" (1997) ("critique of the banal fantasies that pass as 'vision' among of many of those who speculate about cyberspace and politics in our time")
• William Wresch, Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996)
• Jeff Zaleski, The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology is Changing Our Spiritual Lives (New York: HarperEdge / HarperCollins, 1997)

Critique of IT in Higher Education

• C.A. Bowers, The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia U., 1988)
• The Cal State Controversy
  • Update: C/Net, "College Tech Deal Folds" (June 29, 1998)
  • Selected Resources (for fuller bibliography, see Featured Controversy)
    1. "Technology Infrastructure Initiative Supporting Partnership Plan" (the Cal State plan to create a limited liability corporation "comprised of the four corporate partners [GTE, Fujitsu, Hughes, and Microsoft] and the CSU auxiliary") (CSU)
    2. FAQ for the TII (highlights of the plan in question-and-answer format) (CSU)
    3. C/Net, "Colleges to Give Windows Top Billing" (Nov. 24, 1997)
    4. Los Angeles Times, "A Farewell Warning," Jan. 7, 1998: B2 ("As he assumes his new job . . . former Chancellor Barry Munitz delivers a stark pronouncement to those who protest Cal State's creative financial arrangments")
    5. Los Angeles Times, "Microsoft Dropped from University Partnership," April 17, 1998: D1, D5 (coverage of new developments in the controversial Cal State system plan to partner with major technology firms) | see also C/Net, "Microsoft Drops Out of College Deal" (Apr. 16, 1998)
• S. Chaiken and W.L. Mathews, "Will There Be Teachers in the Classroom in the Future? . . . But We Don't Think About That," in McClintock (1988), pp. 80-90
• Stephen L. Chorover, "Cautions on Computers in Education," Byte, June 1984: 22-24
• Chronicle of Higher Education
  1. "Who Owns On-Line Courses? Colleges and Professors Start to Sort It Out" (Dec. 17, 1999)
  2. "An Artist Unexpectedly Finds Herself Transformed Into a Technology Advocate", June 12, 1998: A23 ("Va. Tech's Lucinda Roy pushes to insure minority students aren't left out of the computer revolution") (online version for Chronicle subscribers only)
  3. "U. of Washington Professors Denounce Governor's Embrace of On-Line Education" (June 8, 1998)
  4. "As Educators Rush to Embrace Technology, a Coterie of Skeptics Seeks to Be Heard" (1998)
  5. "Rethinking the Role of the Professor in an Age of High-Tech Tools" (Oct. 3, 1997) ("New technologies could take over many of the instructional duties that now define professors' jobs, according to faculty members who are peering into the future. Some of them are alarmed by what they see, while others are encouraged.") (online version for subscribers only)
  6. "Canadian University Promises It Won't Require Professors to Use Technology" (Oct. 3, 1997) (report on a faculty strike action that won the faculty the right not to be required to put courses online or use high-tech in the classroom) (online version for subscribers only)
• "Classical Studies Degree at George Mason University under Threat of Elimination" (1998) ("As reported in The Washington Post of March 15, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at George Mason University has begun a process of extensive restructuring to bring the college in line with the university's new emphasis on technology. As a result 19 degree programs in arts and sciences are being slated for elimination. Among these are the B.A.s in Classical Studies, German, Russian, and Russian Studies as well as M.A. degrees in French and German and the Graduate Certificate in Translation, all offered through the Department of Modern and Classical Languages.") (The Classics Page at George Mason U.) | See Washington Post, "Liberal Arts at GMU Targeted by Degrees: Proposed Cuts Draw Immediate Protests"
• The Industry Standard: The Newsmagazine of the Internet Economy
  • "Higher Earning: The Fight to Control the Academy's Intellectual Capital" (June 28, 1998)
  • "Academics Rebel Against an Online Future" (June 12, 1998) ("University of Washington professors protest plans for education over the Internet. The backlash has begun.")
• Los Angeles Times
  1. "Will Technology Commercialize Higher Learning?" Jan. 19, 1998: D6 (". . . some academics are starting to view their institutions as emergent clones of market-driven high-tech companies instead of as universities and colleges")
• Ed Neal (U. North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "Using Technology in Teaching: We Need to Exercise Healthy Skepticism," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19: B4-5
• David F. Noble (York U.), "Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education" (1998) (ƒ ¡ ® s † - m ¤ ñ d @ ¥ [First Monday])
• Douglas D. Noble, "Let Them Eat Skills," in Henry A. Giroux with Patrick Shannon, eds., Education and Cultural Studies: Toward a Performative Practice (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 197-212
• Todd Oppenheimer, "The Computer Delusion" (1997) (critique primarily of IT use in lower-education, but contains much of general interest on the topic of IT and education) (Atlantic Monthly)
• Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1986; rev. ed. 1994) (esp. Chap. 3, "The Hidden Curriculum")
• Kenneth R. Stunkel (Monmouth U., N.J.), "Point of View -- The Lecture: A Powerful Tool for Intellectual Liberation," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 1998: A52 ("The claim is that students on the World-Wide Web can explore knowledge unencumbered by arbitrary, teacher-centered instruction. They can tailor their education to their own 'individual learning styles' and 'diverse educational needs.' Proponents of interactive learning need to be reminded of the neglected phenomenon called 'good lecturing . . .' ") (online version for subscribers only)
• Teaching and Technology: The Impact of Unlimited Information Access on Classroom Teaching, Proceedings of a National Forum at Earlham C., (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian, 1991)
• Myron C. Tuman
  1. ed., Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers (Pitssburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 1992)
  2. Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992)
• Langdon Winner (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "The Handwriting on the Wall: Resisting Technoglobalism's Assault on Education" (1997) (major essay on the general problem of the corporatization of education by a well-known philosopher and historian of technology)
• William Wresch, Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996), Chap. 9 on "World Education"

Information Technology Portrayed in the Arts (Overlaps with Business Portrayed in the Arts)

This is a selection of creative works that engage powerfully or richly with the idea of IT. Because the relation between works of art and the theme of IT can be indirect, annotations are sometimes fuller than in other parts of this bibliography. Suggestions for this section are very welcome.)

• 19th-Century
  • Walt Whitman, "A Passage to India" (occasioned by the Trans-Atlantic Cable)
• Contemporary
  • Joe Amato (Illinois Institute of Technology), "What a Little Moonlighting Can Do" (1998) (a contemporary poet's essayistic / multimedia / free-form reflections on the arts and the academy in the age of business and technology)
  • Blade Runner (Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford and others. Embassy / Combia Tri-Star / Warner Brothers, 1982. Running time, 117)
  • Brazil (Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal / Embassy International, 1985. Running time, 131)
  • Pat Cadigan Home Page (Chris Fowler)
  • Cyberpunk: Initiated by such science-fiction writers of the '80s and '90s as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, and Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk has had an impact beyond the normal audience of genre fiction. This is partly because it uses "postmodern" narrative devices and characters to mold the "street"-world of its underlying genre conventions--detective, film noir, western, and other "pulp fictions"--to the contemporary world of information technology. But it is also due to the clarity of its conviction that populist street-culture in the near future must dance the "dance" (as Gibson puts it) with a corporate culture so powerful and omnipresent that it effectively replaces all other social and political institutions (governmental, educational, medical, etc.). Knowledge workers of the near future belong from cradle to grave to multinational corporate structures that provide everything from residential arcologies to law enforcement. As emblematized in the lifestyle that the street-hacker hero of Gibson's Neuromancer calls "biz," the culture of the near future is all a negotiation between small con men or hackers in popular culture and amoral corporate conglomerates. Information technology ("cyberspace") is the landscape on which this new gunfight at the OK Corral is fought without benefit of traditional standards of legitimacy. --A.L.
    • General Cyberpunk Resources
      1. CyberDrek Kulture (Gridpoint Nexus)
      2. Cyberpunk Page (quotes many brief definitions) (Henry W.Targowski; Mark/Space Interplanetary Review)
      3. Hyper-Weirdness: Cyberpunk and the New Edge Page
      4. Martin Irvine (Georgetown U.), Technoculture from Frankenstein to Cyberpunk (course)
    • Selected Criticism
      1. David Brande, "The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson," in Robert Markley, ed., Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 79-106
      2. Roger Burrows, "Virtual Culture, Urban Social Polarisation and Social Sicnece Fiction," in Loader (1997), pp. 38-45
      3. Andrew Ross, "Cyberpunk in Boystown," in his Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), p. 137-67
  • Pat Cadigan Home Page (Chris Fowler)
  • William Gibson
    • Neuromancer (New York: Ace / Berkley, 1984) (the canonical cyberpunk novel; its imagination of the transition from individual and "family" business to multinational corporations is particularly chilling)
      1. Search the Text of Neuromancer (case-sensitive search form; returns passages in context)
      2. Study Guide for William Gibson: Neuromancer (Paul Brians, Washington State U.)
      3. Po-Mo SF: William Gibson's Neuromancer and Post-Modern Science Fiction (Martin Irvine, Georgetown U.)
    • Burning Chrome (1986; rpt. New York: Ace, 1987)
    • Count Zero (1986; rpt. New York: Ace, 1987)
    • Idoru (1996; rpt. Putnam, 1996)
    • Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988)
    • Virtual Light (New York: Bantam, 1993) (particularly interesting in its depiction of the patchwork survival of "obsolete" and "throwaway" culture on a future San Francisco bridge that has become an oasis in the midst of high-tech, corporate culture; "Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tatoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic. . . . ")
    • With Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (New York: Bantam, 1991) (set in the period of Charles Babbage and the nineteenth-century pre-history of the computer)
    • William Gibson Page (Patrick Ernzer)
    • William Gibson Page (includes news of Gibson's novel, Idoru) (Joe Foley)
    • The Yard Show (William Gibson Page) (William Gibson, Christopher Halcrow)
    • William Gibson's Alien III Script
    • "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" (text of the limited-edition, read-once/self-destroying, art-book poem)
  • Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Novel (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969)
  • Network (Dir. Sidney Lumet. Perf. Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and others. United Artists, 1976. Running time, 120)
  • John Shirley Page
  • Neal Stephenson
    1. Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992)
    2. The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam, 1995)
       1. Diamond Age Page (Michaela Rhea Drapes)
          • Selected Links:
          • Stephenson Links
          • Summary of Novel
          • The Role of Hypertext in The Diamond Age
    3. Alan Liu, Brief Description / Review of Diamond Age
    4. Neal Stephenson Page (Mark/Space Interplanetary Review)
  • Bruce Sterling
    1. Crystal Express (New York: Ace / Berkley, 1989) (short stories set in Sterling's compelling "posthumanist" universe of "Shapers" versus "Mechanists")
    2. Holy Fire (New York: Bantam, 1996) (richly-textured, unpredictable imagination of a future dominated by the health-care industry; the sensibility of the female protagonist is particularly nuanced)
    3. ed., Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace / Berkley, 1986)
    4. with William Gibson, The Difference Engine (New York: Bantam, 1991) (set in the period of Charles Babbage and the nineteenth-century pre-history of the computer)
    5. Bruce Sterling Page (Kim Baumann Larsen / Molly Cumming, Rice Design Alliance) | Bruce Sterling Texts on the Net
    6. "Cyberpunk in the Nineties"
    7. The Hacker Crackdown
    8. "Twenty Evocations"
  • Victoria Vesna, et al. (U. California, Santa Barbara), Bodies, INCorporated (sophisticated multimedia, interactive online environment in which users construct virtual bodies and "incorporate" as part of an exploration of the interface between art and corporate zones. The site appropriates/parodies the legal licensing and liability language of corporate structures to provoke reflection on the boundaries between personal and corporate in the notion of "property")
    1. Project Description
    2. Sample Page
    3. Christopher Newfield (U. California, Santa Barbara), "Corporation H" (1997) (essay)