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Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information
Paperback book.
278 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 13, 2022
Like most books that are a collection of essays, this one is a hit-and-miss.
THE GOOD:
The book contains some beautiful and thought-provoking passages such as the following, taken from the opening essay by co-editor Baol:
I also very much enjoyed the interview with George Lakoff, which contains some interesting musings on the embodiment of thinking and the difference between natural and artificial intelligence.
Last but not least there is an interesting reflection on information technology, mass media, and warfare in the essay by Robins & Levidow (though to be fair, it owes a lot to Beadrillard essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place).
THE BAD:
Sadly, these nuggets of gold as described above are to be found in a pile of manure.
Though advertised on the cover as "A burning barricade across the highway to the total surveillance society", the two-digit number on the reader count reveals that it is less of a burning barricade and more of a pebble placed on the railroad. If I hadn't promised this review to a friend who is interested in the book (Hi there, Sophie!), writing and posting it here would've felt like yelling into an empty room.
My biggest complaint about RtVL is that it isn't really a book about the virtual life. Rather, it is a book on marxism first and everything else second. The reader is hard-pressed to find a page that does not use phrases like "capital", "class", "exploitation" and the like. That by itself is not necessarily bad, but all this marxist critique is delivered in a rather cynical or even nihilistic tone. Throughout the book there is a near-constant decrying of the sad state of affairs we live in without offering anything of an alternative. And it does not appear as if the authors place much hope in the people, the real low point in this attitude coming in the form of the following quote from the Shiller essay:
Aside from the unwarranted resentment aimed at people with mental health problems, this quote pretty much sums up the point so brilliantly made by George Orwell in his memoir The Road to Wigan Pier. In this book, Orwell writes about how some socialists who are concerned with poverty and inequality simultaneously show a remarkable disdain for the very people they claim to defend. Schiller here adopts the same attitude, that of a condescending academic who loathes privilege as much as he loathes the common, underprivileged people and their daily interests.
With this cynical postmodern attitude also comes a style of writing that has a ritualistic quality to it. By this I mean that essays like this are 50% about what is said, and 50% about how it is said. There is a lot of exposition, flowery language, French quotations that are left untranslated, and references to concepts and authors so obscure that it amounts to the kind of academic writing which Bricmont & Sokal in their book Fashionable Nonsense labelled "intellectual terrorism". These obscure names and factoids are thrown around casually without any introduction or attempt to define or further elaborate on them, the reader is expected to known and understand all of these reference. All this adds to the "ivory tower of left-wing academics" vibe this book is giving off. While multiple authors bemoan the "buzzwords" used in advertisements, their own writing is riddled with predictable and trite postmodern phrases like "deconstructing", "subverting", and "bourgeois ideology". Combined with their fixation on language and power relations, some passages seemed to have rolled right out of the The Postmodernism Generator.
Having finished Resisting the Virtual Life I am left with the puzzling conclusion that, with these essays, the authors have achieved precisely what they accuse information technology of doing: that of creating a bleak outlook on life that is devoid of authentic human contact. In their writing there is almost no room for personal experience (except for Ullman's fifteen pages of complaining about how immature her colleagues are) because in their critique everything is reduced to class and to power relations. It's as if the authors cannot imagine real, authentic individuals, but only "subjects" who have been shaped by technology and ideology. If information technology is bad, then the worldview put forth in this book is even worse.
THE GOOD:
The book contains some beautiful and thought-provoking passages such as the following, taken from the opening essay by co-editor Baol:
“[T]he receiver of messages and images are not in a crucial sense independent of the medium. Television, for example, produces the televisual body – the couch potato. Different mediating technologies, in general, construct different subjects. The computer harnessed by the logic of administrative science, marketing, political advertising, or epidemiology constitutes a “population” quite removed from traditional notions about human groups in a nexus of community, kin, and social memory. All interiority and psychological depth are either effaced or reappear in the guise of “the irrational” and “the subjective”. A population, in this “virtual” sense, is not the crowd, mob, people, folk, proletariat, nation, or citizenry of other discourses; its membership is defined by Boolean operation and segmented arbitrarily by age or income or shopping habits or blood group or zip code or some intersection of variables.”
I also very much enjoyed the interview with George Lakoff, which contains some interesting musings on the embodiment of thinking and the difference between natural and artificial intelligence.
Last but not least there is an interesting reflection on information technology, mass media, and warfare in the essay by Robins & Levidow (though to be fair, it owes a lot to Beadrillard essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place).
“Vision and image technologies mediate the construction of the cyborg self. The so-called Gulf War highlighted their role. In a very real sense, the screen became the scene of the war; the military encountered its enemy targets in the form of electronic images. The world of simulation somehow screened out the catastrophic dimension of the real and murderous attack.” (...)
“Paradoxically, the Gulf [War] video images gave us closer visual proximity between weapon and target, but at the same time greater psychological distance.”
THE BAD:
Sadly, these nuggets of gold as described above are to be found in a pile of manure.
Though advertised on the cover as "A burning barricade across the highway to the total surveillance society", the two-digit number on the reader count reveals that it is less of a burning barricade and more of a pebble placed on the railroad. If I hadn't promised this review to a friend who is interested in the book (Hi there, Sophie!), writing and posting it here would've felt like yelling into an empty room.
My biggest complaint about RtVL is that it isn't really a book about the virtual life. Rather, it is a book on marxism first and everything else second. The reader is hard-pressed to find a page that does not use phrases like "capital", "class", "exploitation" and the like. That by itself is not necessarily bad, but all this marxist critique is delivered in a rather cynical or even nihilistic tone. Throughout the book there is a near-constant decrying of the sad state of affairs we live in without offering anything of an alternative. And it does not appear as if the authors place much hope in the people, the real low point in this attitude coming in the form of the following quote from the Shiller essay:
"These matters do not come up regularly on the nation's talk shows, concerned as they are with Madonna's underwear or the suicides of pathetic rock stars" (p. 25).
Aside from the unwarranted resentment aimed at people with mental health problems, this quote pretty much sums up the point so brilliantly made by George Orwell in his memoir The Road to Wigan Pier. In this book, Orwell writes about how some socialists who are concerned with poverty and inequality simultaneously show a remarkable disdain for the very people they claim to defend. Schiller here adopts the same attitude, that of a condescending academic who loathes privilege as much as he loathes the common, underprivileged people and their daily interests.
With this cynical postmodern attitude also comes a style of writing that has a ritualistic quality to it. By this I mean that essays like this are 50% about what is said, and 50% about how it is said. There is a lot of exposition, flowery language, French quotations that are left untranslated, and references to concepts and authors so obscure that it amounts to the kind of academic writing which Bricmont & Sokal in their book Fashionable Nonsense labelled "intellectual terrorism". These obscure names and factoids are thrown around casually without any introduction or attempt to define or further elaborate on them, the reader is expected to known and understand all of these reference. All this adds to the "ivory tower of left-wing academics" vibe this book is giving off. While multiple authors bemoan the "buzzwords" used in advertisements, their own writing is riddled with predictable and trite postmodern phrases like "deconstructing", "subverting", and "bourgeois ideology". Combined with their fixation on language and power relations, some passages seemed to have rolled right out of the The Postmodernism Generator.
Having finished Resisting the Virtual Life I am left with the puzzling conclusion that, with these essays, the authors have achieved precisely what they accuse information technology of doing: that of creating a bleak outlook on life that is devoid of authentic human contact. In their writing there is almost no room for personal experience (except for Ullman's fifteen pages of complaining about how immature her colleagues are) because in their critique everything is reduced to class and to power relations. It's as if the authors cannot imagine real, authentic individuals, but only "subjects" who have been shaped by technology and ideology. If information technology is bad, then the worldview put forth in this book is even worse.
May 9, 2019
Essential early critique of the technologies which have so shaped our lives in the decades since it was published. Must-read for all aspiring Luddites.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews