reviews 584 College & Research Libraries November 1997 ist and your politics become Libertar- ian. If the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Web site starts sporting Microsoft’s banner ads, sells its demo- graphics to direct marketers, and links to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, I sup- pose I will have to concede that Sobchak is right—but do not count on it. There are other essays in the book, but what I have described thus far serves to illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the cultural stud- ies approach that informs much of the volume. The method boils down to pos- iting some type of horrifyingly unjust, underlying structure that you think tends to manifest in all the various prod- ucts of Western culture, and then to select some things you have heard about the Internet that seem to echo this pattern. As a method, this pattern- matching, Marx-alluding technique pro- vides the touchstone for interesting, thought-provoking, and often madden- ing creative writing projects. The results can be amusing, too, thanks in part to the unintentionally hilarious overstate- ments (e.g., “Prepare for holographic Slashers to break out of ’alt.sex.stories’ and stalk the earth”). At the end of the day, though, you really do not know any- thing more about the Internet’s hidden assumptions, or how the network is likely to shape society in the years to come.—Bryan Pfaffenberger, University of Virginia. Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Ed. Sven Birkerts. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf (Graywolf Forum, 1), 1996. 261p. $16 (ISBN 1-55597-248-9). LC 96- 75790. Many librarians, as they watch the gradual migration of their collections from print to electronic form, experience some unease over a question few actu- ally verbalize: What influence does the medium through which our culture passes have on the ability and willing- ness of readers to engage in dialog with result will be sabotage and terrorism, coupled with the loss of civil liberties as governments crack down. I frankly do not see how the chaotic and varied as- semblage of fact, opinion, marketing hype, and loonyism that currently con- stitutes the “knowledge” available on the Internet could possibly confer “ever more intoxicating powers.” Admittedly, the ability to access Internet “knowl- edge” (or more to the point, to differen- tiate between online trash and treasure) may make some slight contribution to career success in the years to come, but the strategic value of Internet access surely pales before the real determi- nants of class differentiation in Western society (class, race, and differential ac- cess to high-quality education). Turning to the “democratic possibili- ties” of electronic media technologies, Sobchak (“Democratic Franchise and the Electronic Frontier”) begins by not- ing, in the term franchise, the conflation of the right to political participation and the exclusive rights of commercial en- terprises to sell products in a certain area. For most of us, the term’s two meanings might seem accidental, an artifact of intersecting word histories, but for Sobchak, they testify to an un- derlying cultural conflation of political liberalism and capitalism that pops up in anything American do. This conflation signals a contradiction between politi- cal freedom and monopoly capitalist domination, Sobchak says, which lies at the heart of American culture. But, of course, this is not recognized: It is mys- tified by its reappearance at the super- structural level in the notion of free- market competition. The Internet re- peats this pattern, she says, by offering what appears to be enhanced political participation blended with a healthy free market, but this masks the areas of contestation between political free- dom and capitalist domination, and to the extent that you buy into this, you become a numb, apathetic consumer- Book Reviews 585 writers? In a way, this is an old ques- tion: Choices between alternative “data formats” are at least as old as micro- film, and indeed can be fairly said to date back to the invention of writing as an alternative to the culture of oral nar- rative. With the advent and rapid spread of our modern digital text-and- image culture, however, the question appears to face us now with a special vengeance. Is our cultural heritage be- ing totally reformatted, and if so, with what consequences for the nature, con- tent, and integrity of cultural transmis- sion? Reviewer and critic Sven Birkerts addressed the effects of technological change on readers in his much-dis- cussed 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. He based his reflections on the obser- vation, surely correct, that “how we re- ceive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret real- ity.” In this earlier book, Birkerts dwelled on the joys of reading but wrote with special ardor and eloquence of the glo- rious tactility and meaningfulness of the printed book as a vessel of knowledge and vicarious experience. Yet, as the title suggests, with its allusions to wakes and funerals, Gutenberg is a deeply pessi- mistic, even gloomy, work. Birkerts finds that “the whole familiar tradition of the book” is “destined for imminent histori- cal oblivion,” more broadly seeing him- self and a dwindling number of his thoughtful contemporaries being “gradually coerced into living against [their] natural grain, forced to adapt to a pace and a level of technological com- plexity” that is now driving them to re- volt, though without any hope of suc- c e s s . Now Birkerts presents this new an- thology of twenty essays, some written especially for the volume, others previ- ously published in literary magazines. Although from a host of differing and often conflicting perspectives, the es- says in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone have in com- mon that they address the other, the “writing” half of the cultural transmis- sion dyad. The title, of course, is just as loaded as that of Birkerts’s earlier work and reflects his own unbroken agenda. It alludes to Leo Tolstoy’s alleged re- fusal to use a new invention called the dictaphone, which Tolstoy explained by saying it would surely be “too dread- fully exciting” and distract him from the content of his literary compositions. In his letter to prospective contributors to his anthology (quoted in his introduc- tion), Birkerts makes no bones about his own views on the topic at hand (“What will be the place of self, of soul—of art- ist, writer, individual—in the society we are so hell-bent on creating?”). Yet, de- lightfully, the responses of these free- spirited contributors cover the entire gamut of reaction to the new technolo- gies, from the arrogant technophobia of novelist Paul West and the blanket rejection of all “simulacra” by environ- mentalist writer Mark Slouka on the one hand, to the ruminations of hypertext fiction writer Carolyn Guyer and the eager embrace of technology by femi- nist multiculturalist Carole Maso, for whom electronic writing is very wel- come in that it opens up a “deeper undertanding of the instability of texts, of worlds.” (Maso states further: “Elec- tronic writing will help us to think about impermanence, facility, fragility and freedom, spatial intensities, irrever- ences, experimentation, new worlds, clean slates.”) Between these extremes are a num- ber of writers who, like most of the rest of us, are struggling to maintain good writer’s discipline despite the siren en- ticements of “AutoText” and “StyleCheck” and to preserve what is important and valuable in preelectronic writing technologies, while at the same time showing a guarded openness for the potential of the new, almost infinite but, above all, instant mutability of text. These 586 College & Research Libraries November 1997 essays also deal with technology most broadly. At the low-tech end of the scale, novelist and essayist Lynne Sharon Schwartz, herself the author of a very Birkertsian book on why we read and how what we read shapes us (Ruined by Read- ing, 1996), considers the anthropological aspects of telephone communication. Magazine editor Wendy Lesser praises how e-mail, “once it has been brought under control and made to function in the life you have already constructed for your- self,” can “reintroduce us to the form of writing that best enables us to know and acknowledge friendship.” Three essays in this volume stand out as especially illuminating and per- suasive. They are, first, the article by the anthologist himself, entitled “’The Fate of the Book’” (note the double set of quotation marks, playing on the al- ready vast body of literature on this topic), in which he offers a crystal-clear summation of his extensive reflections on the functional, perceptual, and semiological differences between books and screen technologies, going beyond those contained in Gutenberg and break- ing somewhat with his earlier either/or dichotomy. “These are not two ap- proaches to the same thing,” Birkerts now writes, “but two different things. Books cannot and should not have to compete with chip-powered imple- ments.” A second intriguing contribu- tion to this volume is that of national poet laureate Robert Pinsky, translator into English of Dante’s Inferno (1994) but also author of Mindwheel, an early inter- active computer game, and thus a writer standing confidently astride both cul- tures. Pinsky considers the worldview of the brilliant, but culturally myopic, postwar inventors of computer technol- ogy who have brought all of this progress down upon us and in the pro- cess imposed a part of that worldview upon their less technically inclined con- temporaries. Finally, and most poeti- cally, I enjoyed the essay “Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook,” by University of Michigan English professor Alice Fulton. Fulton contemplates the aes- thetics of the computer screen, poeti- cizing the encounter between human and machine much as Birkerts has done with the encounter between reader and book, in the end emerging with a syn- thesis of her affections for screen and book cultures that serves to temper some of the shrillness of other articles in this collection. Birkerts’s new anthology probably will be of less native interest to librarians than Gutenberg, for it is the mediation of the process of reading, not writing, in which we as a profession are most di- rectly involved. Yet, for the light these diverse essays cast on culture creation in the digital age, Tolstoy’s Dictaphone offers a fascinating complement to Birkerts’s previous book. Those inter- ested in a more scientific (i.e., less hu- manistically oriented) study of the dia- lectics of writing and text technology may wish to turn to another recent col- lection of essays: The New Writing Envi- ronment: Writers at Work in a World of Tech- nology (1996).—Jeffrey Garrett, Northwest- ern University. << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /All /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Warning /CompatibilityLevel 1.3 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.0000 /ColorConversionStrategy /CMYK /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 1 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness false /PreserveHalftoneInfo true /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts false /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages false /ColorImageMinResolution 151 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.10000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages false /GrayImageMinResolution 151 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.10000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages false /MonoImageMinResolution 600 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.16667 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile () /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /ENU (IPC Print Services, Inc. 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