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by Mark Slouka

Author:	Mark Slouka
Subcategory:	Technology
Language:	English
Publisher:	ABACUS; First edition & printing in this form edition (1997)
Pages:	185 pages
Category:	Math and Science
Rating:	4.8
Other formats:	mbr mobi lrf rtf

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Mark Slouka (born 1958 in New York City) is an American novelist and essayist who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-tech Assault on Reality. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine.

War Of The Worlds book. This is the brave new vision of the digital avant-garde, computer crusaders leading a high-tech assault on what was once known as reality. Sophisticated, well-funded, unabashedly messianic, they have the power, the technological know-how, and the marketplace savvy to make good on many of their wildest prophecies. With War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace.

Mark Slouka is Neil Postman's kindred spirit. These essays offer a critique of how cyberspace effects and changes the rest of reality. Mark Slouka is a lecturer in literature and culture.

With "War of the Worlds, " Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing .

With "War of the Worlds, " Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace. With "War of the Worlds, " Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace. Результаты поиска по книге. Отзывы - Написать отзыв.

With War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's . For example, when he discusses virtual reality, he is talking about the old text-based worlds created by users back in the first half of th. .

With War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace. Because I enjoyed Slouka's much more recent book of essays, I read this book, first published in 1995. Still worth reading, I'm adding this book to my shelf of critical books along side Jaron Lanier's and Eli Pariser's critiques. nmele, April 6, 2013. With an acerbic tongue, Slouka examines what he considers to be the dark side of the net. Slouka can get quite melodram. Mark Slouka is Neil Postman's kindred spirit.

War of the Worlds : Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. By (author) Mark Slouka.

With War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of.He's currently writing a book on the decline of the physical world in modern life, and his fiction has appeared in Harper's magazine. Country of Publication. The Perseus Books Group.

Comments:

Niwield

It's fascinating to return to Mark Slouka's prescient words some 15 years later -- a lifetime, maybe 2 or 3, in the advancement of digital technology & its world. Or is it really advancement? That was the question then, and it's even more pressing today, when the digital has become the unnoticed sea in which we all swim. Those who are old enough remember a pre-digital world; those born into it have never known anything else. It truly is their everyday reality now.

These days there are more books written & published about the negative effects of the digital world -- although they tend to preach to an ever-decreasing choir, alas. The lure of the online is just too powerful for most people, too satisfying, too addictive. Attention spans shorten, depth of understanding dries up like a puddle in summer, and everyone lets the Web do their thinking for them.

But as Slouka pointed out in 1996, there are those who would like sentience itself to migrate to the Web. Already some technophiles rhapsodize about the possibilities of digital immortality, of somehow transferring their consciousness to computers & achieving a sort of eternal life, freed of the flesh, almost angelic, translated to a digital paradise wherein they can indulge their every fantasy -- forever. Far-fetched? Not to many, who not only find such a prospect quite possible, but incredibly desirable.

As someone once said, the danger isn't that computers will learn to think like us, but that we'll learn to think like them. No question but that the digital world is a powerful tool! The question is, are we using that tool for human purposes, or we adapting (or crippling) ourselves to live in the digital world at the expense of our humanity? At the very least, it's a sobering question to be pondered at length, before surrendering to the Web entirely. Slouka presents that question clearly & urgently. We would do well to stop & think about it -- with our own brains, rather than Googling it.

Highly recommended for the thoughtful human being!

Hulis

This book reads very quickly. Mark Slouka's writing style easily holds my attention to the end. Unfortunately he sacrifices depth of analysis for interesting rhetoric. This timely topic needs more thought and I think this book comes up way too shallow. Slouka's excellent writing abilities here seems to indicate that he could have taken more time and thought and come up with a better, more insightful book. He tries to steer a thoughtful middle course between technophilia and luddism, but I don't think that he really found it.
Instead he clangs a lot on the rhetorical bells with a message that essentially comes down to, "pull your head out of cyberspace and live in the real world!" coupled with some vague paranoia about the "digerati's" plans for us. While that might grab the attention briefly, the realities of these issues come out as far more complex -- not every cyberspace junkie spends their time in MUUDs and in some cases cyberspace provides as much competition as encouragement for television watching. I know plenty of cybernauts who never watch any television at all. He did make some vague attempts at the end to tie this all down to some philosophy of essentialism, though he didn't elaborate much except to throw the words around rhetorically.
I take Slouka's concerns seriously and share them. I recommend his book to the extent that he talks about things we all should talk about and also because the book reads quickly and easily without coming across like Mickey Mouse. But I find myself still waiting for the thoughtful alternative vision to unmitigated technophilia and outright luddism. The read seemed great while it lasted but left me ultimately unsatisfied and pretty much back where I started. Maybe it will inspire someone to do a more thoughtful analysis of these issues.

Moralsa

This author has a wonderful, questioning mind. I bet he'd be great to sit down and have a conversation with.

This book was written in the 90s, when the computer boom was taking place, and it's a fascinating snapshot of it's time. Even if you just enjoy 90s era things (the initial reason I bought this), it's great as a bookshelf Zeitgeist. Whether or not you agree with all the author has to say (and I get the feeling he'd be disappointed if you agreed with everything), it's a thought-provoking piece of philosophy.

I'm definitely no techno-phobe, but let's all sit down and think about the effect our constant interaction with and through machines might have on our mind, shall we? It'd make a great discussion.

Munigrinn

The WAR OF THE WORLDS, a not very original title, is a long essay with forebodings of a dystopian ending to the computer revolution. It is a critique of the cyberist or digerati world view. In short, Slouka doesn't like where the digital revolution is heading. There were a few good metaphors presented: Reality has the maximum bandwidth and the goal of digerati is to maximize the broad-band width of cyberspace. These computer fanatics want to generate a virtual reality indistinguishable from real life. So Slouka calls all these computer-TV generated images harmful illusions.

Has he thought this thesis out? If his imagination is so great, how can illusion be so harmful? Is a walk through the digital, virtual, fake, projected park so different from a walk through a real park? He wants to value events generated by the human senses, by the body's chemical detector-projectors, far above those illusions generated by digital-electronics. Slouka fails to show why the solid ground one walks on is any different from virtual ground, if that can be made to feel solid too. His cry into Thoreau's Walden cave has no echo.

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