Student Affairs On-Line The on-line magazine about technology and Student Affairs Gary D. Malaney - Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst Editor Stuart Brown - StudentAffairs.com Executive Editor

Join our mailing list!    First Name        Last Name        School        Email            ©2007    StudentAffairs.com    All Rights Reserved	BOOK REVIEW Dark Fiber: Tracking critical internet culture Lovink, Geert. (2002). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. List Price $27.95, 394 Pages Review by Jennifer Guy-Cain Jenngc0013@yahoo.com Posted: February 10, 2003     Student Affairs Online, vol. 4 no. 1 - Winter 2003  Posted: February 10, 2003          Student Affairs Online, vol. 4 no. 1 (Spring 2003) Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (2002) by Geert Lovink documents the history of Internet culture and contains hypotheses about the future of Internet culture. The author approaches many different topics in this book, from language and the constraints that it has on the Internet, moderated chat rooms, to how the Internet was used during the Kosovo war.  In the introduction, the author states, “The texts assembled here point to the economic and political bias and blind spots of the still dominant cyber-libertarian ideology” (p. 1). Dark Fiber does, indeed, provide a very thorough investigation of the economic and political bias on the Internet throughout the entire text.   Some of the information found in this book is an interesting commentary on what student affairs professionals and students may find in their daily use of the Internet. For example, in the chapter “Sweet Erosions of Email,” Lovink discusses how unwanted mail (junk mail) in email is beginning to slow down the response time. He states that the full mailboxes many people encounter are becoming a stressor rather than fulfilling the original intent of making them more productive. His hypothesis is that there will be more filters for email to try to eliminate unwanted email. Another example of a chapter that student affairs professionals may find useful is “Meetspace.” In this chapter the author discusses how the Internet can influence and affect the format of meetings and conferences.   Dark Fiber, however, is largely a commentary on the relationship between politics and the Internet. Therefore, while some chapters can assist student affairs professionals in understanding the Internet and the Internet culture, much of the content in the book does not really focus on issues which student affairs administrators would encounter.   Printer Friendly Version