The Internet and Society

If you look for a empirical and graphic illustration of cyberspace, this is not your choice. This book is intended to contribute to theoretical founding of cyberspace. So most pages are devoted to reviewing and elaborating various existing theories, researches. That is, this is a meta-theorizing. His founding theoretical orientation is not fashionable postmodernist but Giddens¡¯s theory of structuration, particularly the knowledgability of actor, and modernity. The author manages to bring about a persuasive extension of Giddens¡¯s approach to cyberspace. He argues there is no reason to see that online community is not that different from offline day-to-day life from totally discrepant angle as postmodernists claim. Online community also assumes the development of the integrity, trust and shared stock of knowledge. What is needed to assess the experience of this brave new world is the proper theory of media and modernity. The overall outline of the book is like this:Ch.1: dealing with the nature of ¡®risk society¡¯ depending on Giddens and Habermas.Ch.2: illustrating the technological and institutional features of internet.Ch.3: theoretical founding of internet as media based on Thompson¡¯s conception.Ch.4: arguing that the virtual community is not that far cry from actual (offline) community. So we can cope with it based on existing framework.Ch.5 arguing that mobilizing IT into organizations like the enterprise, i.e., restructuring, should be reconsidered in the light that IT changes the settings of interaction for IT is a form of media. This chapter tackles the cases of government and NGO¡¯s IT adoption too. Ch.6: focusing on how the internet enriches and transforms the nature of the self and experience in everyday life. His position is like this: ¡®the self is not being transformed by forces that operate exclusively behind the backs of individuals¡¯.Below are comments I posted on the bulletin board of a graduate class. Most are complaints. Yep. It¡¯s not fair to the author. But the reader I presumed are those who already read the text. So there was not much reason to recapping the text and writing down praises. And some are not that relevant to the book directly. But I think it would be helpful to get what is like the real line of the book. 1. (On Ch.1) This introductory chapter on founding concepts borrowed from Giddens and Beck, in the tint of Frankfurt¡¯s conception of life world, is much more graphic than Castells¡¯s. But the sketch of time-space distanciation or modernization, in the light of uncertainty and risk is not figurative. And that, there is no definition of ¡®risk¡¯. Yep. Risk is well known concept and widely used. But the writer mixes it with life world in the sense of Frankfurt¡¯s. he should have suggest the definition of those concepts to place in the context. And worse, he omits various ancillary concepts like danger vs. security, disembedding vs. reembedding, ontological security and so forth. Yep. Recapping whole line of ¡

To the first-time users of both the Arpanet and Milnet in the birthing days of the Internet, it was clear pretty early on that this new technological development could very well become a potent force in society's processes. Sadly, academic exploration lagged in its tracking over the years, apparently favoring instead a focus on technological advances in the new medium. Slevin's work goes far in correcting the shortfall between books that teach us how to approach the Internet and those that speak of how the Internet approaches-and changes-us. He feels the Internet is a new media that informs certain social forces transforming modern society, and that our human relationships re-sculpt themselves in an emerging arena of "manufactured uncertainty" and "manufactured risk." From this thesis, Slevin goes on to do something quite valuable. He creates a new vocabulary, perhaps even a language, which names these often contradictory forces that push and pull our communities with new social tensions and technological innovations. We respond to these tidal flows, of course, both consciously and unconsciously. The point Slevin makes in this is, "we ignore them at our peril." While Slevin's book certainly cannot be described as a fireplace-and--shawl reader, it is, nevertheless, eminently readable for both the specialist and interested layperson. The textual flow is relentlessly outlined, tracking the changes in society from the early days of hand shaking computers through the emergence of today's world wide web. With the careful introduction and naming of each social development, a mental game board emerges, on which one can see how each transforming force dynamically plays out in our human uncertainties. Slevin carefully negotiates the quagmire of describing the Internet in moral terms. He turns away from the battle between doomsday prophets and ecstatic acolytes of the electronic altar. True to the post-modern dilemma, he views the Internet through a multiplicity of lenses. His diopter may not always be accurate, but his focus is unusually clear, particularly on a swirling subject that refuses to be interpreted in linear fashion. In reading through Slevin's careful foundation necessary for a useful vocabulary, one can sometimes lose the sense of raw power for transformation the Internet carries within itself. Slevin seems to counter this by describing how our core institutions, never big fans of any kind of change, creak and groan at their very roots. In fact, he makes a good case that certain organizations are responding to the Internet in a fitful reflex of denial or embrace, perhaps even an odd combination of both, unconsciously sowing the seeds for their own destruction or transformation. On the other hand, his views on emerging virtual communities are quite tantalizing. While he agrees it is not productive to trade a real life for a virtual world, the Internet does offer the potential for relating to one another through continually c

As a doctoral student in Mass Communcation at the University of Texas in Austin studying the social impact of the Internet, I was glad to find a text that discussed the Internet from a social and cultural perspective. It was so refreshing to find that someone recognizes that the impacts of technology are broader than just the "online culture." I was also inspired by Dr. Slevin's active approach recommendation to technology, rather than the passive approach or wait-and-see approach, or the technozealot/technophobe approaches that are prevalent in current literature. I, too, feel that the impact will be the sum total of various pros, cons and indifferences of the medium and that only through a coherent study of technology and an analysis of communication and sociological theory will we be able to grasp its opportunities and consequences. I plan to refer to this book and the resources on the associated Web site as a key resource in my dissertation process. The focus on the arguments of Giddens, Thompson and Baumann strengthened the position of the author and grounded the work in sociological theory. Slevin realizes that we must not assume that traditional theory will apply in this new medium, but that we must analyze existing theory and understand that the unique dynamics of the Internet might modify or even rewrite theory. This work is powerful and insightful in its ability to integrate and apply multiple perspectives. I only wish that I could have written this book myself!

Good books about the Internet are rare, but Slevin's book is certainly one of them. It approaches the Internet from a social point of view, and describes the Net as a completely new medium, which covers aspects of all other existing media, and which, being so varied, has some major advantages over single, separate media (like newspapers or television). As Slevin argues, the Internet differs from a single, separate medium in that it does not merely have a push role, but can give people so much information as to make a real difference and a huge impact on society. Slevin might, as such, have named his book 'Internet is Society' rather than 'Internet and Society'.The book is a good introduction to the origins and definitions of the Internet. It describes how young people basically grow up with the medium and how other people are spending more and more time and money to explore the Net. The book also deals with the Internet's possibilities and, not unimportantly, with the risks that are involved. These risks being a hot issue in society at the moment (risk management in organizations), Slevin's book provides some new insights into handling the Internet, both online as well as offline. So the book is a kind of a SWOT analysis of the Net and I am very impressed by this book!René Kalsbeek M.A.Communication Studies, University of Amsterdam