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The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture
A skeptic by nature, a writer and teacher more at home with ballpoint pens than computer programs, Dinty W. Moore wanted to find out for himself if the much-touted Internet and the electronic culture it has spawned is really going to be the Next Big Thing, or whether it's the emperor's new clothes. This is not a how-to guide, a giddy net-head's online magical mystery tour, or a binaries-in-the-sky futurist treatise. Instead, this book tells it like it is about the Internet. Anyone who's asked, Who's there? What am I missing? and What is it all about? will find Moore's good-natured skepticism a welcome break from the explosion of wide-eyed techno-hype raging all around us. "Moore is far and away the best pure writer of the 'Wired School.' He's like the Stage Manager poking his head in around the set of 'Our Town.' Funny that it took the arrival of this commonsensical outsider to finally put a real human face on the digital world."--San Jose Mercury-News.
219 pages, Hardcover
First published January 9, 1995
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About the author
Dinty W. Moore
33 books193 followersDinty W. Moore is author of the award-winning memoir Between Panic & Desire, the writing guides The Story Cure and Crafting the Personal Essay, and many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Georgia Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction, and teaches master classes and workshops across the United States as well as in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, and Mexico.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 18, 2015
An early promising critique of the internet and its effect quickly morphed into a vague MFA style rant wanting of good insight and humor.
June 30, 2016
I should preface this review with the caveat that when I selected the book from the library, I didn't know it was written in 1995.
That being said, it's very interesting to read this more than twenty years later and see what predictions came to pass and which were off the mark. For example, the author said that "some have estimated that every person on the planet will be 'networked' by the year 2003." No dice on that one. But then there's this: "Futurists envision someday linking up these communicating computers to your cable television wires, adding connections to the ATM programs at your bank, splicing in the major airline reservation systems and all those pesky shop-at-home catalog companies, and eventually tying all of this into your electronic garage-door opener." Right on the money.
Then there were the somewhat-rambling bits about Thoreau and the author trying a bit too hard to be funny. Not a bad book, but not something I'm apt to recommend, either.
That being said, it's very interesting to read this more than twenty years later and see what predictions came to pass and which were off the mark. For example, the author said that "some have estimated that every person on the planet will be 'networked' by the year 2003." No dice on that one. But then there's this: "Futurists envision someday linking up these communicating computers to your cable television wires, adding connections to the ATM programs at your bank, splicing in the major airline reservation systems and all those pesky shop-at-home catalog companies, and eventually tying all of this into your electronic garage-door opener." Right on the money.
Then there were the somewhat-rambling bits about Thoreau and the author trying a bit too hard to be funny. Not a bad book, but not something I'm apt to recommend, either.
March 10, 2011
Re-reading this now is almost painful, but it's the nostalgia that brings me back.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews