taylorsu@hplabsc.UUCP (02/28/87)
Recently, Jim Day of Xerox sent to the group a list of titles of books that would be relevant to the interests of Computers and Society Digest readers. As I perused the list I realized that I've read quite a few of them, but don't have the time to write full reviews. I've thought about it and realized that there are probably quite a few other people who are in the same proverbial boat, so I'd like to start a new type of posting in the Digest - Book Paragraphs - that are one paragraph or less mini- reviews of books. As time permits we will have full reviews of the books, but this should prove to be a nice way for us to keep up a bit better with the recent publications in the area... So submit your BPs today!! - - Dave Here are some to start with... - - Steven Levy, "Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution" When I first picked up this book I said 'yech', figuring it would be a topical glorification of a subculture that I find dangerously naive about the world around them, but it turns out to be quite a fascinating read. There are some interesting stories about the early sixties and seventies and it helps show that 1. some of those hacker types were pretty wierd, and 2. they were also brilliant and far ahead of their time. Good airplane reading... - - Sherry Turkle, "The Second Self: Computers & the Human Spirit" This was a mixed book at best - parts of it were really interesting, especially the discussion of how children assimilate technology into their lives, but parts were terribly slow and boring, notably the section that talks about the MIT computing subculture. It is worth skimming, but a serious read is probably going to be frustrating. - - Norbert Wiener, "The Human Use of Human Beings" This was one of the most frustrating books that I've picked up since it seemed like it would be really excellent (after all, Wiener was one of the founders of cybernetics - attempting to find parallels between men and machines, especially analogies to the human nervous system) but it is written more like a college physics text. I never managed to get through it... - - Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff, "The Network Nation: Human Communication Via Computer" This is quite a fascinating read, and does a very good job of anticipating a lot of the social and cultural changes that computer-based communications have brought about. It is quite dated, however, and should be read with that in mind...In particular some of the examples are very out of date.