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Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Network Society
Shaviro, Steven. (2003). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
List Price $17.95, 289 pages.
Review by Gary D. Malaney
Coordinator, Higher Education Program
University of Massachusetts Amherst
malaney@educ.umass.edu
At the office, I am on-line all of the time - email, Internet searches, uploads to and downloads from the office Web site. But at home, I am not "connected." I have a computer at home, but I use it only for writing manuscripts or crunching data. I do not have Web access, and I do not use email at home. That stuff is my job, not my fun. In many senses, I am a tech dinosaur - I do not yet have a cell phone, and I do not really want one. I have trouble trying to understand why people want to be accessible to others at all times and in all places. Of course, perhaps my datedness shows in that I still spend much of my leisure time reading words on paper, not a digital screen. This activity is something that I have enjoyed since an early age when I used to be an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy - I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for years. And even though I have been out of the genre for a long time (with the exception of Harry Potter), I always am still intrigued by SF and Fantasy books, thus my fascination with the concept laid out by Steven Shaviro in his book Connected: Or What It Means to Live in the Network Society.
In his book, Shaviro connected the technology in many works of SF to the use of technology today. Unfortunately, if you have not read the many SF pieces discussed by Shaviro, the book in not going to have as much meaning. I do not mean to imply that the analogies are not interesting - indeed, they are - but the context cannot be fully appreciated without prior knowledge of the SF works he discussed. Being so far removed from the most recent works in SF, I am not familiar with most of the books discussed by Shaviro, so specific contexts were lost for me. However, the more universal longstanding connection between SF and technology will allow most readers to relate to Shaviro's points.
The structure Shaviro used to make these points is interesting. This is either a book of no chapters or 188 chapters (give or take a couple - the breaks are not numbered), depending on one's concept of a chapter. For 250 pages of text, there clearly are many breaks, but that also means there are a lot of ideas. Not all of the "essays" are technology-oriented, but some of the better topics for me include a discussion of K.W. Jeter's Noir where people strive to be anything but connected and Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's comic book series Transmetropolitan which represents a future American city that is fully networked.
Although not directly related to college life, many students, staff, and faculty will find Shaviro's look into the future of technology applicable to their settings. Undergraduates, who today are typically more "connected" than the rest of us, might relate most to the technological content, but all readers of current science fiction will likely find the book most appealing.
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