Book Notes Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction, by James E. Katz & Ronald Rice, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002. This outstanding work provides a comprehensive and highly readable analysis of how people use the Internet. Drawing on nationally representative telephone surveys carried out between 1995 and 2000, it examines how users employ tech- nology, form communities, referred to as "social capital," and how they express themselves and interact within that context. As is often the case with major societal developments, there is a tendency to either hail them as a panacea or to condemn them out of hand. While the authors discuss many of the Internet's shortcomings, and while they also praise its ben- efits, they have above all, presented a balanced portrait. True, the Internet has changed lives for some and destroyed them for others. Yet its chief value for most individuals has been to expand and improve the lives of the average citizen. For many, the Internet constitutes a sort of compartmentalized existence. The "self" manifested on it differs from that exhibited in the daily interaction that oc- curs when people meet on a face-to-face basis. Nonetheless, there is a synergy between the two and the authors highlight that by naming their research, the "Syntopia Project." They argue that the idea that electronic media change culture, often noted in the literature on cyberspace, is actually a tautology given the fact that social life "predicates and affects the use of any technology" (p. 269). It isn't a question of determining what came first. Rather, it makes little difference because they interact on each other, often simultaneously, throughout the ongoing, ever- changing process. Although the Internet is used most heavily by the white middle-class, this doesn't imply bias since virtually all segments of society have equal access to it. Moreover, as the use of the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, class differences will become less important just as they have with the telephone. At the same time, Katz and Rice point to significant remaining differences in how the Internet is used by vari- ous groups--between men and women, those with higher and lower levels of edu- cation, and older and younger people (p. 31). Of particular value is the use of quantitative and qualitative approaches in the research. For instance, in Chapter Five, an example is given of the high school football player who used the Internet to gain an advantage over his opponents. Through the presentation of community examples, we learn about the Internet as a community building vehicle and as a way of reducing group conflict through com- munication. William Helmreich is Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. He may be reached at <[email protected]>. Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Fall 2005, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 125-126.
Transcript
Book Notes
Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction, by James E. Katz & Ronald Rice, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
This outstanding work provides a comprehensive and highly readable analysis of how people use the Internet. Drawing on nationally representative telephone surveys carried out between 1995 and 2000, it examines how users employ tech- nology, form communities, referred to as "social capital," and how they express themselves and interact within that context.
As is often the case with major societal developments, there is a tendency to either hail them as a panacea or to condemn them out of hand. While the authors discuss many of the Internet's shortcomings, and while they also praise its ben- efits, they have above all, presented a balanced portrait. True, the Internet has changed lives for some and destroyed them for others. Yet its chief value for most individuals has been to expand and improve the lives of the average citizen.
For many, the Internet constitutes a sort of compartmentalized existence. The "self" manifested on it differs from that exhibited in the daily interaction that oc- curs when people meet on a face-to-face basis. Nonetheless, there is a synergy between the two and the authors highlight that by naming their research, the "Syntopia Project." They argue that the idea that electronic media change culture, often noted in the literature on cyberspace, is actually a tautology given the fact that social life "predicates and affects the use of any technology" (p. 269). It isn't a question of determining what came first. Rather, it makes little difference because they interact on each other, often simultaneously, throughout the ongoing, ever- changing process.
Although the Internet is used most heavily by the white middle-class, this doesn't imply bias since virtually all segments of society have equal access to it. Moreover, as the use of the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, class differences will become less important just as they have with the telephone. At the same time, Katz and Rice point to significant remaining differences in how the Internet is used by vari- ous groups--between men and women, those with higher and lower levels of edu- cation, and older and younger people (p. 31).
Of particular value is the use of quantitative and qualitative approaches in the research. For instance, in Chapter Five, an example is given of the high school football player who used the Internet to gain an advantage over his opponents. Through the presentation of community examples, we learn about the Internet as a community building vehicle and as a way of reducing group conflict through com- munication.
William Helmreich is Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. He may be reached at <[email protected]>.
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Fall 2005, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 125-126.
126 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Fall 2005
The authors' work serves to stimulate further thinking on the subject, from how logs of daily Internet use can help map out social configurations, social networks, emotional responses, etc., to how emails sent in error to unintended receivers can sometimes have serious consequences.
Reading this book, the reader comes away convinced that the Internet is one of the great developments in human history, serving as far more than a facilitative technological invention. Katz and Rice are persuasive, articulate, and highly cre- ative in the arguments marshaled to support that view. And, when all is said and done, I doubt that many people would say (except in moments of frustration when their computers break down) that we were better off before the Internet's arrival.
William Helmreich
Book Notes 127
Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax, by Tom Tucker, PublicAffairs, New York, 2003.
The kite lofted in stormy weather as Benjamin Franklin waited for his ultimate scientific triumph. Using a simple apparatus, this simple man in a simple coun- t r y - f a r from the sophistication and politics of England's Royal Society and France's Acadrmie Royale--intended to prove in 1752 the that lightning and electricity were the same. Franklin triumphed. The kite and his other electricity experiments vaulted him to international celebrity status. When a desperate American Revolu- tion needed help in 1776, the aging savant headed for France, where his charm and celebrity earned America a valuable ally and saved the American effort.
Everyone knows this. But maybe Franklin never flew the kite. Maybe he hoaxed the public, just as he had done before, and just as he would do again.
This is the story Tom Tucker tells in his maddening book, Bolt of Fate: Ben- jamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax. The book reflects a serious research effort, approaches its topics with great care for historical context, but does not deliver proof of its dramatic selling point--that the alleged hoax saved the Revolution.
Tucker sets before himself two difficult tasks. First, he must show that the kite experiment was a hoax. Second, he must show that it led to Franklin's influence in Europe during the Revolutionary War.
It will be difficult for most readers to evaluate Tucker's arguments that Franklin never few the kite. He provides a careful reading of Franklin's description of the experiment and then investigates whether the experiment as described could actu- ally have occurred, given the 18th-century materials, technology, and facilities at Franklin's disposal. He writes that the kite, as described, would not have flown given the set-up of the experiment. Had it flown, lightning likely would have elec- trocuted Franklin.
In making this argument, Tucker takes on more than 200 years of received wis- dom and the research of I. Bernard Cohen (1990). Franklin scholars and writers appear to be unswayed by Tucker's arguments. Isaacson (2003, note 13, p. 534) strongly sides with Cohen's affirmative evidence, and Wood (2004), although not taking an explicit stand, writes that "most historians would agree with Walter Isaacson that Tucker's argument is unpersuasive" (note 13, p. 258).
Why would Franklin have hoaxed the world? Tucker shines here. He shows the reader that the past is truly a different world; in this case, where advances in elec- tric science appeared in popular magazines, scientists engaged in bitter personal rivalries (well, maybe the past is not so different), and fashionable parties swirled around games involving the new phenomenon of electricity.
Take a standard kissing game, in which a young lady would be charged and then kissed to elicit an electric shock. "One device was to bunch up your lips, urging the maiden ahead of time to do the same and then to consummate the rosebud kiss so familiar to the eighteenth century. There are very few nerve ends in that part of the
Howard J. Shatz is a Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco. He may be reached at <[email protected]>.
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Fall 2005, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 127-128.
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mouth, whereas the contemporary lips-back-sucking kiss of our era would be, with electricity added to the inner-mouth nerve ends, extremely painful" (p. 17).
Atop this world stood three scientists with tradesmen's roots--William Watson of England, the Abb6 Nollet of France, and Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia. Franklin's only problem in the late 1740s was that he was not getting proper credit in Europe for his experiments. In fact, Tucker writes, Watson was claiming credit-- not difficult in a world of six-week voyages across the Atlantic, no telegraph, and no Internet.
In response, in Tucker's telling, Franklin described an experiment that one could do regarding electricity and lightning. Had Watson actually done it as described, it might have killed him. For reasons of internal court politics and perhaps even sci- entific advancement, the French actually did a variation of the experiment. The results of this so-called Philadelphia Experiment, performed at Marly-le-ville north of Paris, combined with a French translation of Franklin's earlier work on electric- ity, pushed Franklin to international fame.
Unfortunately, Tucker does not provide sufficient evidence for the book's moti- vation, the idea that it might have been Franklin's kite hoax that endeared him to the French and allowed him to negotiate an alliance, making it "the hoax that won the American Revolution" (p. 234). A more likely reading of the evidence is that the Phila- delphia Experiment and Franklin's electricity writings brought him to prominence, his stay in England throughout the late 1750s and 1760s helped him cement his continental reputation, and then his wily statecraft and endearing personality helped him seal the alliance with the French after his return there starting in late 1776.
Aside from the evidentiary problem, the book contains some annoying writing quirks, colloquialisms, and gaps in the narrative. Tucker refers to Franklin at times as Franklin and at other times as Benjamin. Analyzing Franklin's account of the kite experiment, Tucker notes a questionable claim and writes, "Boy, that one slides by" (p. 143). Discussing the death of St. Petersburg lightning scientist Georg V. Rikhman, Tucker raises the issue of bolt lightning versus ball lightning, but never explains the difference (p. 163).
There are really three stories in Bolt o f Fate. One is the connection between the kite and the American Revolution, a story that does not work. The second is the story of Franklin the scientist and hoaxer. Part of this story is whether Franklin actually flew the kite and Tucker does exemplary detective work to find out. Whether he succeeds in changing the historical view of the experiment will depend on the decisions of other knowledgeable scientists and historians as to whether to pursue his claims. The third is the cultural history of electricity and the tale of interna- tional scientific competition in the new electricity science. Tucker succeeds most fully in this third story, giving a valuable illustration not only of 18th-century sci- entific competition, but just as important, showing how very difficult it was for the scientific pioneers to understand something that 250 years later is commonplace.
Howard J. Shatz References
Cohen, L Bernard, Benjamin Franklin's Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Isaacson, Walter, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Wood, Gordon S., The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
Book Notes 129
The Forgotten Network: D u M o n t and the Birth of American Television, by David Weinstein, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005.
You could hardly hear anything above the storm of outrage that day. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had just announced it was easing restrictions on television ownership, allowing a single owner to hold stations that reach 45 percent of American households instead of 35 percent, and Congress was snorting and drooling and barking like Old Yeller at the end of the movie.
"We really are going into uncharted territory," bawled Sen. Olympia Snowe (R- Maine). "What the FCC has done here is very destructive," added Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). "I 'm very disappointed in the FCC. They completely and totally caved in to big broadcasting interest, in my judgment, against the public interest."
The ruckus grew so great that even Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was roused from wherever he was sitting shiva for Strom Thurmond and the States' Rights Party. "This is not a Democrat or a Republican issue," Lott thundered. "This is not even really philosophical or regional. This is your view of the media and what type of regulations do we want in place to make sure that we have variety and diversity in the media and not a dominance by one company or just three companies."
Lott paused for breath, and in the background I could hear the faintest rustling noise. I am pretty sure it was Allen Du Mont, turning over in his grave. Or perhaps he was whispering a warning: Anytime somebody wants the FCC to protect con- sumers from big business, reach for your remote.
Du Mont, a TV manufacturer who began offering programming in an attempt to boost sales of his sets, created America's first television network in 1946, when he linked his pioneering stations in New York and Washington, D.C. It would grow to scores of affiliates and create some of the most memorable programming of television's infancy, including Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners, Ted Mack's Origi- nal Amateur Hour, and the lovably discombobulated Captain Video and His Video Rangers, which not only introduced a generation to the enthralling possibilities of outer space but arguably prepared its brains for the onslaught of hallucinogens that would come in the 1960s.
But by 1955 Du Mont's network was out of business, strangled in its crib by an FCC that was protecting not consumers but its old (and generous) clients, the radio networks, which wanted to get control of the burgeoning new medium before it seriously threatened them. Du Mont was the first victim of an FCC protectionist jihad that for three decades confined Americans to a three-channel television uni- verse populated by video mutants like My Mother the Car and My Living Doll.
The Forgotten Network, David Weinstein's absorbing account o fDu Mont's rise and fall, is aptly titled. Even the explanation of why the network altered the spell- ing of its creator's name to DuMont has been swallowed by the sands of time. Most
Glenn Garvin is author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (Brassey's) and, with Ana Rodriguez, Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women "s Prison (St. Martin's). He writes about television for The Miami Herald. This review was first published on Reason Express <http://www.reason.com/re/current.shtml> and is reprinted here with their kind permission>. He may be reached at [email protected].
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Fall 2005, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 129-133.
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television histories mention DttMont only as a footnote, if that, and because the network left the air before the invention of videotape, its programs have mostly faded from memory. When The Hollywood Reporter recently compiled a list of every scripted network program that ran for more than 100 episodes, it omitted DuMont's Captain Video, which had more than 1,500, as well as Life Is Worth Living, the prime-time religious lecture that ran five years and outlived the net- work itself.
It is the programming that most fascinates Weinstein, an administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and three-quarters of The Forgotten Net- work is devoted to cataloging its peculiar mix of horny daytime hosts, late-bloom- ing vaudevillians, and dime-store space warriors. Though NBC, CBS, and ABC also had eclectic lineups in the early days as everybody groped around in the dark, inventing TV on a daily basis, the DuMont Television Network was especially quirky.
Allen Du Mont himself was an engineer who cared little about programming content; when he watched TV, he spent most of the time flipping from channel to channel, tinkering with the controls to see which broadcast had the sharpest image. (The New Yorker once cracked that "Du Mont is always stimulated by Milton Berle's horizontal resolution, if not his jokes.") Moreover, Du Mont ignored the standard network business model of the day, in which a single sponsor bought an entire show, then exercised totalitarian control over its content. Instead, DuMont pro- grams usually contained commercials from several different advertisers, which meant every comma of a script didn't have to be approved by Procter & Gamble or General Mills. The result was that DuMont producers had much freer rein than their counterparts at the other networks, and--for better or for worse--they used it.
That freedom was never more obvious than at 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, when "Captain Video" whipped out his nucleamatic pistols and thermal ejectors to do battle with evil across the galaxy. Arriving on the DuMont airwaves in 1949 and sticking it out until the network shut down six years later, Captain Video was the first, the last, and certainly the mightiest (he had to be; the prop budget was just $25 a week) of the rocket-jock heroes who magnetically, mesmerically drew America's kids to those early TV sets.
Forget that E.T./Close Encounters we-come-in-peace stuff; Captain Video's policy was to use the atomic rifle first and ask questions later. Spouting outlandish technogibberish--"Throw out the interlocks! Hand me the opticon scillometer!"-- and brandishing equipment made from surplus auto parts, he warred ceaselessly on sinister life forms from every corner of the universe, including a few (like the Black Planet, where tyrannized workers slaved away on collective farms) that sounded suspiciously close to home.
Cheapjack sets (it was not uncommon for the camera to catch sight of the pots of hot water and dry ice that produced the mysterious mists that cloaked so many of Captain Video's alien worlds) were one of the show's signatures. Hopelessly inane scripts were another. Captain Video's original writer, Maurice Brockhauser, was a hack of such prodigious proportions that a frothing producer banned him from the set: "I don't want to see him, I don't want to talk to him!" Eventually such budding science fiction authors as Arthur C. Clarke and Damon Knight helped churn out scripts. Even so, filling a daily half-hour slot proved so difficult that the producers began inserting a bit where Captain Video would check his televiewer to monitor
Book Notes 131
the activities of his rangers around the world--an excuse to toss in 10 or 15 min- utes of shootouts, fistfights, and cattle stampedes clipped at random from old West- erns in the DuMont library. (Are you beginning to understand 2001: A Space Odyssey?) Adults found this stuff terrifyingly incomprehensible, but kids adored it; toy companies took in $50 million a year from sales of Official Captain Video decoder rings, crash helmets, and atomic weapons long before Walt Disney went into the coonskin cap business.
Captain Video may not even have been DuMont's weirdest character; that dis- tinction probably belongs to Dennis James, the host of the daytime women's show Okay, Mother, a pre-Hefner ladies' man who was fond of double entendres and spent much of his airtime hitting on his pretty 18-year-old female sidekick. That show was so successful that DuMont lost it in a bidding war with ABC. Apparently we've been somewhat misled about the relative kinkiness of Eisenhower America.
But there was more to DuMont than eccentricity. The network developed several comedians, including Gleason, Morey Amsterdam, and Ernie Kovacs, who would later go on to stardom at other networks doing essentially the same material. It anticipated Sesame Street by two decades with a smarter-than-it-sounds program called Your Television Babysitter, and its Your Television Shopper was around way before cubic zirconium was cool.
Most intriguing of all was Life Is Worth Living, a weekly chat by the Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen on ethics and philosophy that for many Americans was probably an introduction, however cursory, to the thought of people like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Sheen's plain-talk approach, soft peddling Catholic doctrine while twitting himself with gentle self-deprecatory humor, turned Life Is Worth Living into a genuine hit: It ran Frank Sinatra's CBS show in the same time slot off the air and made enough inroads against Milton Berle on NBC that the comedian was moved to remark that if you were going to tank in the ratings, it might as well be against a show written by the guy who scripted the Bible. Life Is Worth Living is virtually the only DuMont show to have survived the network's plunge into obscu- rity; reruns still air on the Eternal Word Television Network, the Catholic Church's cable channel.
Bishop Sheen stayed with DuMont until the day it went dark before moving his show over to ABC. More typically, DuMont built a star's reputation, then watched him bolt to another network with deeper pockets. For most of its life, DuMont tottered on a financial abyss, too poor to promote its programs or to fund them properly. (The stark, seedy look of Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners apartment had as much to do with the poverty of DuMont's props department as with any creative impulse.)
Part of the problem was Allen Du Mont himself, a visionary engineer but an uncertain businessman and a political naif. A polio victim whose bed-bound child- hood was spent putting together crystal radio kits, he went to work after college manufacturing radio tubes first for Westinghouse, then for DeForest. When the latter went bust, he set out on his own in 1929, building cathode-ray tubes in his garage. Initially the fragile tubes were used mostly in medical and military equip- ment, but as Du Mont improved their shelf life, television became a practical pos- sibility. In 1938 he started manufacturing sets. Two years later he set up New York City's second TV station, hoping to stimulate sales.
Du Mont had little experience with the retail public and none with show busi-
132 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Fall 2005
ness, and it showed. He staffed his boardroom with military men--one former admiral regaled everyone who would listen with tales of the epic battles he staged nightly in his bathtub with model ships--and his network with their cronies and kids. He funded his move into television by selling part of his company to Para- mount in a disastrously structured deal that gave the penurious studio virtual veto power over his spending.
But Du Mont's real problem was the FCC, long a lackey of the big radio net- works, NBC and CBS. (ABC--only recently spun off from NBC, where it had been one of the company's two radio nets--was somewhat less powerful.) Those years were what one FCC commissioner would later recall as "the whorehouse era," when mythic network lobbyists like Scoop Russell and Earl Gammons mag- isterially strolled Washington hallways, dispensing cash and instructions to their federal minions. The networks were determined to extend their broadcast hegemony into the new medium of television, and they used the FCC as their praetorian guard.
The FCC's target of choice was affiliations. The commission, arguing that tele- vision needed to be local, had already capped the number of stations that could be owned outright by any one network at five. Because its partner Paramount owned an independent station in Los Angeles, DuMont could have only four, a 20 percent competitive disadvantage. (Curiously, the FCC's concern for a healthy television industry did not extend to the blatant ways the networks retarded the development of'IN. For years there was no television during daylight because CBS, NBC, and ABC didn't want to cut into their daytime radio audiences; only when DuMont began making money with its daytime lineup did the other networks reluctantly join in.)
DuMont was free to seek affiliation agreements with other stations. But its dis- advantages were even greater when it came to affiliation. About 80 percent of television station owners also owned radio stations, and they were not willing to risk losing profitable network radio shows by linking their TV channels to DuMont, which had no radio programming to offer.
The killing thrust was yet to come, though. In 1945, with only a handful of TV stations on the air, the FCC--whether through cupidity or stupidity is unclear-- had ruled that only 13 channels in the very-high-frequency (VHF) portion of the broadcast spectrum would be set aside for television. (That was later reduced to 12.) The commission's blunder was soon apparent. As more stations began setting up shop, their signals banged into one another. First stations in the same city were for the most part prohibited from broadcasting on adjacent channels (for example, 8 and 9), which cut the available channels in half. That didn't solve the problem; stations as far as 150 miles from one another suffered interference if they broad- cast on the same channel. That effectively limited most metropolitan areas to three channels--meaning one network would lose out. Almost inevitably, that would be DuMont.
DuMont offered a plan that would have at the very least doubled the number of TV channels available in each city: The network proposed using VHF channels in some cities and the new UHF (ultra-high-frequency) channels (14 and higher) in others. Instead, the FCC decided to mix the two frequencies in each city, leaving established stations where they were and assigning newcomers to UHE But that required viewers to buy an expensive new tuner and antenna to watch the UHF stations, and as DuMont predicted, most of them didn't. Why bother, when they could go on watching VHF for free?
Book Notes 133
The result was that just seven cities in America had four or more TV stations, and DuMont was frozen out. By 1952 its affiliates could reach only about 40 per- cent of American television sets. The network's final three years of operation were a tortuous end game, with DuMont selling parts of itself to stay afloat until there was nothing left.
Weinstein pulls no punches in describing the FCC's connivance with the domi- nant networks or the lethal effect it had on DuMont. But he also quotes without objection network executives such as ABC's Len Goldenson saying there was barely enough advertising to support three networks. That's the fox denouncing henhouse overpopulation. At the time the FCC was sticking a regulatory shiv in DuMont's back, television was taking off like one of Captain Video's runaway rockets. In 1947 the annual production of TV sets was 160,000; by 1950 it was 7.3 million. Advertisers could no more have ignored that than the Titanic could have ignored the iceberg.
Weinstein's book closes with the demise of DuMont. He would have had to continue for another three decades to give it a happy ending. The FCC continued to scamper alongside the feet of its network masters for another 30 years, a vigilant watchdog against competition. It battled cable television ("pay TV," the commis- sion derisively labeled it) for years. In pre-satellite days, cable systems related their signals via microwave; the FCC denied licenses to microwave companies that did business with cable. Even when the outright ban was lifted, cable was blocked from the 100 biggest TV markets and forbidden to offer original programming. The FCC was forthright in saying it didn't want cable "siphoning off" viewers from the broadcast networks.
It wasn't until the mid-1970s that a series of court decisions began freeing up cable to compete. The result was not just cable-only channels such as CNN and HBO but a rebirth of broadcasting. On cable, UHF channels were no longer weak and fuzzy, and it was mostly on UHF stations that Fox, the first new American network in 40 years, made its 1986 debut. (Ironically, Fox's VHF affiliates included several stations founded by Allen Du Mont.) Since then, three more networks--the WB, UPN, and Pax--have been born, and in each case the umbilical cord leads straight to cable. Of the WB's 200-plus affiliates, more than half are essentially cable-only channels that cannot be picked up with an antenna.
Meanwhile, the lowest-common-denominator ethos of the three-channel world has been shattered; to compete with Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw, the broad- cast nets have been forced to come up with better, bolder programming of their own. And if you don't like it, then watch a ball game (there are more than 30 sports channels these days), the news (around the clock, not just when Walter, Chet, and David feel like it) or even the Weather Channel. The days when Tuesday night meant choosing between "Petticoat Junction", "Peyton Place", and an old movie are gone forever. Forget what you hear from TV critics--this is the Golden Age of Television.
And the Trent Lotts and Olympia Snowes of the world want to unleash the FCC on it? As Captain Video used to say, "Let's blast them to space dust!"
Glenn Garvin
134 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Fall 2005
The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, byAlan Liu, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Alan Liu, a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Bar- bara, has written a provocative and challenging book that provides a critical view of culture in the information age. He draws on the Schumpeterian idea of"creative destruction," arguing that the innovative forms of producing creativity available now challenge students of the humanities and arts. Creativity no longer resides solely in the hands of writers and artists. Who and what should be studied? What are the aesthetic criteria? What is art; what is literature? How can one unders tand-- or should one even try to understand--the aesthetic value o f databases, Web pages, and the like? Such technological artifacts seem far removed from a novel, a poem, or a painting.
The answer, he suggests, can be found in an examination of"cool," an aesthetic sense of ironic detachment, resistance, and innovation. Cool is new and cutting edge except, of course, when "retro" styles are--ironically---cool, too. What we come to think of as the aesthetic of cool has a history grounded in a particular set o f sociological, economic, and political relations. Liu demonstrates how the transi- tion of the economy from industrial production to knowledge work contributes to the attractiveness of being cool. He then attempts to connect changes in work and leisure, the spread of cool culture, and the future of literature and the arts. No small task.
The book has much to recommend it. A true polymath, Liu brings together an impressive array of sources from sociology, business, anthropology, economics, communications, and history, among other fields. He begins by laying the founda- tion, providing what I would call a political economy of knowledge work and of the creativity that emerges as people react to and resist their working environments. Liu illuminates the power relationships inherent in the new economy. As he notes, " 'knowledge work' is implicitly, but also complexly, a class concept" (p. 393). Knowledge workers are stratified into class-like segments with a "trailing edge clerical worker" separated from more highly skilled "intelligentsia" and "'academic intellectuals." In each of these categories, corporatization of the workplace and o f leisure time has had important effects. Liu shows how being cool has emerged a way for people to show that though they may, o f necessity, be a part o f a larger system, they maintain their individuality and will.
Neither the aesthetic of cool nor the practice of knowledge work is new, and Liu provides a history of how the two have emerged together, beginning with the pro- cess of automating (late 19th century to the 1950s) and continuing to the present
Renre Marlin-Bennett is a Professor of International Relations at the American University School of International Service, where she also serves as Director of the Division of International Politics and Foreign Policy. She is the author of Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy (Lynne Rienner Publishers, May 2004), and Food Fights: International Regimes and the Politics of Agricultural Trade Disputes (Gordon & Breach, 1993). Dr. Bennett also edits iPolitics: Global Challenges of the Information Age, a Lynne Rienner Publishers series. She may be reached at [email protected].
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Fall 2005, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 134-136.
Book Notes 135
processes o f networking. The precursors to the cool aesthetic emerged to describe means of resisting controls like Fordist monitoring of assembly lines and assembly workers' private lives and Frederick Taylor's principles of "scientific" manage- ment. The advent of mainframe computers led to control by computer as well as by the manager. Instead of "one's boss or manager [forbidding] laughing, weeping, cursing, shouting, or celebrating at work; it was a blank cubicle wall that simply shut off social interaction and, within that cubicle, database formations that ac- cepted not a jot of humor nor a single expletive" (p. 118). The control exerted by such regimented working conditions was "cold." This coldness was reinforced by corporate requirements that employees provide "service with a smi le"~the artifi- ciality of the warmth had a chilling effect. Today, centralization mandated by the adoption of mainframe computers has been replaced by decentralized control em- bedded in networked systems. Networking, according to Liu, extends the workplace's artificial warmth to other areas of social interaction, with "corporate culture [be- coming] the new model of sociality, interaction and communication" (p. 172). Be- ing cool means resisting this regimentation and this fake, obligatory warmth. Attempts to be cool are attempts to break out of this corporatized management of emotional life.
But, as with all things cool, there is an additional irony: While we are trying to be cool to resist corporate control of our lives, corporations are commodifying coolness, packaging it, and then selling it back to us. As workers, we are producers of commodified coolness (the commercial products that are cool); as consumers, we buy cool stuff; and as individuals, we try to be cool--simultaneously.
Liu argues that such ironies are central to an understanding of what "cool" means. In his discussion of the "laws of cool" (what I would refer to as facets), he takes on the paradoxical expressions of the ethos, style, feeling, and politics of cool. Inher- ent contradictions point to the essence of cool: cool both is and is not something. It is both of information and against it. Cool is both the ultra-modernist style that typifies cool web pages and the antithesis of that style, a dada-esque rejection of design expectations. Cool politics are directed both inward (private resistance against corporate or governmental oppression by hacking, for example) and outward (use of the Internet for mobilizing activists).
Finally, Liu discusses where the arts and the humanities--as practices and as scholarship---are going in the Age of Knowledge Work. Given that we are all now producers of cool content (or at least potential producers thereof), what role is left for the artist who wants to create or for the scholar whose task is to study, interpret, and derive aesthetic value from that content? The answer, Liu suggests, is history. Humanist scholars are able to place cool cultural products in their historical con- text of radical, critical works of art. Moreover, historical context allows knowl- edgeable observers to make reasoned aesthetic judgments about cultural products. Liu finds the quality of cool an interesting beginning, "but in the end," he finds, "we need an art and literature that are more than cool" (p. 383).
This summary barely scratches the surface of the complex and intricately de- tailed argument. The book is long: almost 400 pages of small print text and almost 100 pages of endnotes in even smaller print. It is also difficult: Liu's prose is often obfuscatory, something a sufficiently Draconian copy editor could have dealt with. A more general problem is that Liu tries to do too much in this single volume. As I
136 Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Fall 2005
read the book, I found myself wishing he had divided his o e u v r e into three--one on the emergence of a cool behavior and cool creativity as a means o f resisting an increasingly corporatized way o f life, one on what the aesthetics o f cool are, and one on the future of the arts and humanities in the Age of Knowledge Work.
As is, I would not assign this book to an undergraduate class or to most master's degree students. Not only is the book too long and the prose too difficult but also, the range of disciplines Liu has brought into the analysis requires a level of intel- lectual sophistication that few undergraduates have. I would, however, recommend this book to doctoral students and scholars. It provides a provocative commentary on the intersection of what we value aesthetically and the over-arching political economy of our global society.
