Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
By Lee Siegel
Spiegel & Grau, $22.95, 192 pages
What is it about the internet that brings so many writers out in a rash? Books about the social effects of the Web neatly divide into breathless, po-faced celebrations of how it will revolutionise everything we know, and sharp-witted but sometimes flip diatribes about how it is precipitating the decline of western civilisation. Against the Machine is one of the latter.
