Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community : Critical Explorations of Computing As a Social Practice

This book addresses how computers affect people's everyday lives. Using actual situations and problems that people have encountered with current software applications, this book offers academics ways to examine how new situations are created through computer use. It contains some of the very first papers on very important topics including the AEGIS disaster, the intriguing new world of MUD environments, and community networks, including a study of Community Memory in Berkeley, possibly the world's first community computer system. The first half contains critical studies, in which the authors explain ways of describing real situations where people are already using computers. This situations are often problematic and much more complicated than the scenarios that the designers envisioned when designing the system. The second half of the book contains constructive studies, reporting experiences in trying to build systems in new ways, with a fully developed consciousness of what people need and the interactions between computer systems and social systems.

Editors Philip Agre and Douglas Schuler have collected 16 essays that examine the interaction between technology and society, with particular emphasis on the question of how individuals involved with computer technology can best promote social responsibility. Overall, the essayists seem undaunted by the prospect of trying to make predictions based on rapidly changing technology. As Agre points out, long-term predictions are often unnecessary, and as long as there are general goals, and policies leading to those goals, we can adjust along the way. As one example shows, Lee Felenstein greatly influenced the development of personal computing and networking through his work with bulletin board systems for social activists, accomplishing social goals without the ability to predict what the PC and cyberspace would be today.

The essays in this book break down into two groups, which the editors categorize as critical and constructive. The "critical" essays analyze the present state of computing and society while the "constructive" essays report on efforts to create alternate approaches. Essays include Hank Bromley's skeptical look at computers in the schools and how their mismanagement could push towards a future of the information rich and information poor. You'll also read Rob King's review of how genre conventions shape nonfiction social analysis, and Chris Hables Gray's analysis of the U.S. Navy's controversial Aegis system and the difficulties of artificial intelligence-assisted warfare. Not to be missed is John Coate's essay that pursues an inn-keeping metaphor for online community building. Coate is a former manager of the Well, one of the older and more famous online communities in existence, and currently runs the Gate for the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle. Given his extensive experience, when Coate serves up advice about online community, it rings true.