| Separation of Index of Names and Index of Topics is a valuable innovation. The latter reveals the content of the book more clearly by being separated from the clutter of the former. It helps in my exercise of reading a book backwards - going first to the index to see what the book is about. Twenty entries with the prefix "cyber" is a clue that the book is about a parallel world in which the familiar topics are transformed. However, human nature remains constant. There are still cybercitizens concerned about cyberdemocracy, cyberactivists and cyberdissidents disagreeing with their government, and therapists providing cybertherapies based on cyberdiagnosis of cyberpathologies.
Two design features are surprisingly absent. How can someone so heavily into multimedia publish a book without a single image? Once again, it may be that there were images in the web version and it was decided for economic reasons to strip them off. However, I wanted to see Webbie Tokay and judge whether she passes the reality test. The only image - the head in the @ symbol on the cover - is clever. However, it doesn't capture the open, forward-looking vision explored in the book. The head is not so much confronting the new reality as being imprisoned by it, staring backwards into the dark. How can someone who argues for the narrative against the numerical tradition write a book with only one first-person story in the last paragraph? He portrays himself as a child running in panic from the dark towards the digital light. On the contrary, this is a scholar who throws his own light on a dark world rather than running to technology for enlightenment. He is brave in our new world. |
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