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Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce--And Why It Matters by Lee Siegel
lelandbuck's review against another edition
1.0
This is not technically a review, but a collection of words that bubbled out after I read this book.
If a person were to put all the interesting books filled with important questions about technology and society in one place, you would know to go someplace else to find this book.
There is something odd about the style of Siegel's writing. He presents some interesting ideas, like the application of Wittgenstein's "The world is all that is the case" to a discussion of isolation and the Internet age. Interesting, but the more I read, the more I asked myself if any of his ideas really mattered? Siegel manages to write well about the things that don't really matter enough to be considered.
In baseball, this is called a strike.
If a person were to put all the interesting books filled with important questions about technology and society in one place, you would know to go someplace else to find this book.
There is something odd about the style of Siegel's writing. He presents some interesting ideas, like the application of Wittgenstein's "The world is all that is the case" to a discussion of isolation and the Internet age. Interesting, but the more I read, the more I asked myself if any of his ideas really mattered? Siegel manages to write well about the things that don't really matter enough to be considered.
In baseball, this is called a strike.
doctorjo5's review against another edition
2.0
The author comes off as angry more than anything else. He was involved in an incident where he made a fake commentor name so that he could comment on his own story where other commentors were criticizing him. It seems like much of his disdain for the internet stems from that one incident. There are some good points made, but overall it just feels like an angry personal rant about how the internet will ruin humanity.
4buddies's review against another edition
2.0
This book frustrated me, but made for great book club discussion in a multi-generational book club.
sonicmooks's review against another edition
2.0
After reading an awful lot lately about the economic and cultural significance of life in the digital age (boosterism), I picked this little diddy up at the library recently in an attempt to get an opposing viewpoint. I mean, Lee Siegel IS one of the most important cultural critics in American today...it says so right there on the dust jacket!
I cannot speak to Mr Sigel's significance in the realm of cultural criticism - I'm not sure if I have ever run across (though I probably have at some point without realizing it) any of his writing for Slate, The New Republic, Harper's or The Atlantic; though I do have some fuzzy memory of some hubub about his posing as an anonymous poster in the comments section of the New Republic website (which he mentions in the introduction here) offering up defenses of himself against vitriolic (anonymous) comments regarding an article he had written. Or something of the sort.
Anyway, all of this considered, and using this book as my main reference point, I just wish he was a better writer.
The prose in this book comes off as stale and whiny, and this has nothing to do with whether you agree or disagree with the content. Siegel does make some valid points about the dangers of completely giving over our lives to the digital realm at the risk of narrowing our viewpoints, deluding ourselves with consenting opinions, and losing our public personas and identity...not to mention our social communication skills.
Some of his arguments made me think about things in a slightly different way, but they did not, on the whole, really challenge me intellectually. Isn't that part of what a "cultural critic" is supposed to do? And no, I'm not really *that* smart.
Overall, what I took from this book is a few ideas that I might not have considered before, or might have forgotten to consider, and that I suppose is a good thing. But I think the arguments could have been much more convincing if they did not suffer from a sometimes bland and confusing ramble of writing. He spends an awful lot of time poking sticks at so called internet prophets and profiteers without offering any sort of engaging or coherent rebuttal. I found myself at times just wishing he was better at making his point, at least when I could figure out what said point was amidst all the noise.
-m
I cannot speak to Mr Sigel's significance in the realm of cultural criticism - I'm not sure if I have ever run across (though I probably have at some point without realizing it) any of his writing for Slate, The New Republic, Harper's or The Atlantic; though I do have some fuzzy memory of some hubub about his posing as an anonymous poster in the comments section of the New Republic website (which he mentions in the introduction here) offering up defenses of himself against vitriolic (anonymous) comments regarding an article he had written. Or something of the sort.
Anyway, all of this considered, and using this book as my main reference point, I just wish he was a better writer.
The prose in this book comes off as stale and whiny, and this has nothing to do with whether you agree or disagree with the content. Siegel does make some valid points about the dangers of completely giving over our lives to the digital realm at the risk of narrowing our viewpoints, deluding ourselves with consenting opinions, and losing our public personas and identity...not to mention our social communication skills.
Some of his arguments made me think about things in a slightly different way, but they did not, on the whole, really challenge me intellectually. Isn't that part of what a "cultural critic" is supposed to do? And no, I'm not really *that* smart.
Overall, what I took from this book is a few ideas that I might not have considered before, or might have forgotten to consider, and that I suppose is a good thing. But I think the arguments could have been much more convincing if they did not suffer from a sometimes bland and confusing ramble of writing. He spends an awful lot of time poking sticks at so called internet prophets and profiteers without offering any sort of engaging or coherent rebuttal. I found myself at times just wishing he was better at making his point, at least when I could figure out what said point was amidst all the noise.
-m
sophiahelix's review against another edition
2.0
I was intrigued by this book when the author was interviewed on the Daily Show because, after almost ten years of very extensive involvement in internet communities, I've started to become uneasy not so much with the commercialization of the media but of the anonymity he speaks about. I find, on the whole, that people are willing to say appalling things when they don't have to attach their own names to it, especially when they don't have to respond in a real-time, face to face confrontation but can instead take their time and avoid open conflict.
All of which seemed to be what the author was going to discuss... but I got nearly halfway through before being bored to tears by his discussion of a number of entrepreneurs and thinkers whose ideas date from the dotcom boom, thus being almost completely irrelevant today given the fast pace of e-business. Worse, his "discussion" involved nothing more than a string of critiques, leaving it up to the reader to figure out what his own position might be in a vacuum rather than merely in response to other thinkers' positions.
His introduction confirmed what I suspected; he's approached the internet from a professional writer's point of view a generation ahead of this reader born in 1981, and so he's coming from a powerful outsider's position in which he's accustomed to having a much more lopsided interaction with his readers. When he related having created what we'd refer to as a "sockpuppet" to reply anonymously in his own defense to some (admittedly vile) detractors commenting on his columns I knew we were in trouble -- he apparently saw nothing shady about this at the time, whereas in the communities I'm used to your identity is your greatest currency, a reputation to be polished and added to, and diluting it with anonymous comments of your own is disingenuous to say the least.
His descriptions of the impact of the internet on modern life did resonate with me to some degree, especially the concept of using the same interface to access many spheres of interaction, from shopping to dating to porn-searching to emailing to... book-reviewing. I find that I need to establish discrete identities in different areas of the internet, and the bleedover can be disorienting. However this was just one bright spot in a sea of rather uninteresting (and uninformed, to some degree) arguments, so I ended up putting this one down.
Furthermore I've seen more informed and worthwhile commentary along these lines in the communities I mentioned above, which was enough to render this book as a kind of sidenote from an outsider not versed in real internet interaction.
All of which seemed to be what the author was going to discuss... but I got nearly halfway through before being bored to tears by his discussion of a number of entrepreneurs and thinkers whose ideas date from the dotcom boom, thus being almost completely irrelevant today given the fast pace of e-business. Worse, his "discussion" involved nothing more than a string of critiques, leaving it up to the reader to figure out what his own position might be in a vacuum rather than merely in response to other thinkers' positions.
His introduction confirmed what I suspected; he's approached the internet from a professional writer's point of view a generation ahead of this reader born in 1981, and so he's coming from a powerful outsider's position in which he's accustomed to having a much more lopsided interaction with his readers. When he related having created what we'd refer to as a "sockpuppet" to reply anonymously in his own defense to some (admittedly vile) detractors commenting on his columns I knew we were in trouble -- he apparently saw nothing shady about this at the time, whereas in the communities I'm used to your identity is your greatest currency, a reputation to be polished and added to, and diluting it with anonymous comments of your own is disingenuous to say the least.
His descriptions of the impact of the internet on modern life did resonate with me to some degree, especially the concept of using the same interface to access many spheres of interaction, from shopping to dating to porn-searching to emailing to... book-reviewing. I find that I need to establish discrete identities in different areas of the internet, and the bleedover can be disorienting. However this was just one bright spot in a sea of rather uninteresting (and uninformed, to some degree) arguments, so I ended up putting this one down.
Furthermore I've seen more informed and worthwhile commentary along these lines in the communities I mentioned above, which was enough to render this book as a kind of sidenote from an outsider not versed in real internet interaction.
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