Adam Gopnik on New Books About the Internet

Feature-writer Adam Gopnik proffers an insightful roundup of recent book chatter about the Internet in the February 14 issue of The New Yorker. The piece, How the Internet Gets Inside Us, Gopnik corals the current book-buzz of Internet fretters and speculators into three categories:

"...the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment."

Books mentioned, grouped in the above categories respectively, are:

Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, edited by John Brockman
The Book in the Renaissance, by Andrew Pettegree
The Sixth Language, edited by Robert K. Logan

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
Hamlet’s BlackBerry, by William Powers
Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle

Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, by Ann Blair

March CommQuote

This month's quote comes from Lamar Van Dyke in the current The New Yorker's American Chronicles piece, Lesbian Nation, by Ariel Levy. The article is an informative and entertaining portrait of the lesbian separatist movement of the late 1970s which never grew to more than a few thousand (but that seems huge by today's standards if you think in terms of numbers of folk willing to live so adventurously outside the consumer landscape, never mind if their adventures were a little confused). Levy focuses on the most colorful separatists, the Van Dykes, who do not represent the most influential or ideological subgroup of the movement but who would probably make for the movement's best movie (script writers looking for material, take note). Levy describes the group as a "roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men unless they were waiters or mechanics, and lived on the highways of North America for several years, stopping only on Women's Land" (p. 30). Lamar Van Dyke was their "star" and her rueful observation on our mediated existence at the conclusion of the article is our March CommQuote.

"'Your generation wants to fit in,' she told me, for the second time. 'Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?' There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else--an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. 'We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television--we didn't sit around looking at screens,' she said. 'We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted.'"--Lamar Van Dyke, as spoken to Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, March 2, p. 37