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| Thierry Bardini, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the UniversitÈ de MontrÈal, is a sociologist. Perhaps this is why he chose to make Bootstrapping his title. I, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, am a psychologist. Perhaps that's why I would have made Douglas Engelbart my title. A biologist would no doubt have made Coevolution the title and a historian Origins of Personal Computing. The point is that no one discipline can do justice to those four topics in the title. All we can each do is practice the academic art of subsuming the other disciplines under our own by placing their three concepts in the subtitle. Each of us can only hope to tell the story we can best tell. Dr. Bardini, sociologist, tells the story of Bootstrapping. It's a story well told. He focuses firmly on the sociological level of analysis in which he is most competent, while respecting the sub-plots of the psychologist, the biologist, and the historian. Douglas Engelbart is the main character in his story. This charismatic figure strides through the book, at the head of a brilliant squadron of scholars, who shared and despaired in his bootstrapping crusade. His omnipresence is demonstrated by the fact that he doesn't appear at all in the index. One would just have to list him as Pages 1 - 232 passim. Coevolution of person and machine is a major theme in the plot of the story. It is subsumed, however, under Engelbart's particular vision of this coevolution as intelligence augmentation (IA) as opposed to the more familiar artificial intelligence (AI). This theme and this vision are well-chosen. The story told in this book could be considered as the latest (last?) chapter in the Big Story of historical time. |
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