Against the Machine

"Of course the internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It's become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn't just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture in ways with which we haven't yet reckoned. The Web and its cultural correlatives and by-products - such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the "bourgeois bohemian" - have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused "self-expression" with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine - that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity."--BOOK JACKET.Siegel, Lee is the author of 'Against the Machine' with ISBN 9780385522656 and ISBN 0385522657.