Connected: Engagements with Media Review

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(More customer reviews)This collection of would-be anthropological writings primarily from Rice University authors is a much-needed addition to an area of society that has entirely insuffient coverage. Not only media, but cyberspace, has somehow escaped going under the social-anthropological microscope.
While this text does so, in some cases, quite well, in other pieces, the work is obviously exploratory, experiemental and possibly of questionable value.
The essay on the electronic venacular is, of course, already dated, but it is a detailed examination of the Internet from a user's perspective. The author looks at specific programs and how users employ them to express themselves. But it seems like a drop in a very large bucket of work that needs to be done on the growing globe of Internet users.
The essays A Torn Page, Framed and A Tale of an Internet are too abstract and experimental to be effective, but Computing for Tibet and Shades of Twilight were excellent pieces. Both grounded in specific communicators and communications and both exploring how the media are interacting with people politically, emotionally, personally. Dorine Kondo, who wrote Shades of Twilight, has done great scholarship in previous publications, so it's not surprise that her work her is excellent. She explores a new form of drama as a new form of communication. If I could rate the various essays separately from the whole book, I'd give her essay a solid 5 on the Amazon scale.
Also, scoring a 5 would be Rewriting New York City. The author examines graffiti as a form of expression. It's a new area and it's interesting to compare ideas of banning graffit as loss of freedom of speech and the autoBots on MSN chat room that give chatters the boot for typing the word, "piss" into a phrase in the chat room dialog. How much freedom of expression does the culture REALLY allow?
Good scholarship, new roads into new territories.

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From the frontiers of cyberspace to Tibetans in exile, from computer bulletin boards to faxes, film, and videotape, the ongoing and often startling evolution of media continues to generate fresh new avenues for cultural criticism, political activism, and self-reflection. How is contemporary life affected by this stunning proliferation of information technologies? How does the Internet influence, and perhaps alter, users' experience of community and their sense of self? In what way are giant media conglomerates implicated in these far-reaching developments? Connected, the third volume in the groundbreaking and highly acclaimed Late Editions series, confronts these provocative questions through unique experiments with the interview format. It explores both the new pathways being forged through media and the predicaments of those struggling to find their way in the twilight of the twentieth century.

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