Books, Arts & Manners: Highway to Hell?

Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, by Clifford Stoll (Doubleday, 224 pp., $22)

CLIFFORD Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil is essential reading for anyone who is devoted to the Internet, anyone who has ever gone anywhere near the Internet, or anyone who can spell “computer” without looking it up. It is entertaining, too, as essential books go. Stoll uses plain language and lots of examples to argue that computers and computer networks are ludicrously overvalued in modern America. The hype that surrounds them used to be funny, but no more. The computer culture, Stoll writes, “directly threatens precious parts of our society, including schools, libraries, and social institutions.”

DG

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David Gelernter

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Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, by Clifford Stoll (Doubleday, 224 pp., $22)

CLIFFORD Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil is essential reading for anyone who is devoted to the Internet, anyone who has ever gone anywhere near the Internet, or anyone who can spell “computer” without looking it up. It is entertaining, too, as essential books go. Stoll uses plain language and lots of examples to argue that computers and computer networks are ludicrously overvalued in modern America. The hype that surrounds them used to be funny, but no more. The computer culture, Stoll writes, “directly threatens precious parts of our society, including schools, libraries, and social institutions.”