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Title: A good essay gone horribly awry...
Review: ...or at best, a good thesis dragged on much too long. Stoll's world view is valid - there really is a real world out there and it's darn interesting. Certainly, computers are at times frustrating, isolating money holes. But like everything else, the cyberworld is cheapened by hype, commercialization and the over use of the prefix "cyber-". Most of us are able to figure this out, so must it be regurgitated over and over for 236 pages? Stoll's writing is the book's strongest point, but the serial reminiscences do get taxing, and are more than a bit narcissistic. Stoll's arguments, on the other hand, suffer from a lack of consistency -- he complains that access to networks is too slow, but criticizes e-mail as being too fast for proper savoring as communication. Come on, aren't at least some of us smart enough to see these pitfalls on our own? I give this book a "4" only for the delicious irony that I ordered it ... over the Internet
