College and Research Libraries


friend." The Luddites, if that is what they 
were, have for the most part left the field 
now, and those of us who remain can 
scarcely imagine how we ever taught 
writing or carried out our own research 
without the computer. However, as we 
become more familiar with this technol-
ogy and become increasingly reliant on 
it, we also are troubled by potential prob-
lems-for example, the expense of main-
taining it and of keeping up with rapid 
developments. Will material on CD-
ROMs still be accessible when that tech-
nology is displaced? Can we be confi-
dent, in times of financial restraints such 
as we now experience, that CD-ROM 
readers will be maintained or that infor-
mation now stored on CD-ROMs will be 
transferred to newer forms? 

Lanham argues that the computer will 
produce a more active/ interactive reader 
and create an active/interactive social 
community of readers and researchers. 
Possibly, but the question remains 
whether that active reader's activity will 
include reflection and deliberation or 
merely be a response to what is on the 
screen. And recognition that the social 
activity in which the computer user en-
gages is, at times, unproductive and even 
antisocial is leading more and more edu-
cational institutions to limit the amount 
of time per week a student may spend 
on the Internet. (Visiting a few white 
power Net sites will persuade anyone 
that the social aspects of the computer 
can be frighteningly antisocial.) For some 
of us, computer time is being limited by 
the fact that our institutions are billing 
us for using home modems to connect 
with the university's mainframe. Such 
concerns may seem niggling in the face 
of the optimism and breadth of Lanham's 
generalizations, but they are the reality 
tempering all grand hopes and dreams. 

Anyone searching for a vision of the 
future electronic library in this book will 
be disappointed. Apart from very gen-
eral statements that online publication 
has great potential for the future and that 

Book Reviews 583 

books cannot be the (sole) basis for fu-
ture planning of libraries and the educa-
tion of librarians, Lanham has little to say. 
With apparent implications for the rest 
of us, he quotes a recommendation from 
a large law firm that the periodicals in 
its library "should be sold and replaced 
with their CD-ROM equivalents." How 
wonderful it would be, for those of us in 
literature, to have on searchable CD-
ROMs the contents of those massive vol-
umes of Publications of the Modern Lan-
guage Association and other journals 

Visiting a few white power Net 
sites will persuade anyone that 
the social aspects of the computer 
can be frighteningly antisocial. 

whose high-acid paper crumbles as we 
turn the pages! Would that our libraries 
had the budgets of large law firms! 

Rhetoricians are a feisty lot, deter-
mined to assert their place in the acad-
emy-and rightly so. Lanham is certainly 
better at this than almost any other rheto-
rician with whom I have had contact. 
When he goes after his Curmudgeons 
and Luddites, he does so with impres-
sive vigor and, at times, a bit of slipperi-
ness, too. Will rhetoric be the means by 
whi.ch all intellectual enterprise will con-
verge and permit us to live in Lanham's 
idealized world of oscillations and 
bistability? Probably not, but it is fun to 
watch Lanham argue the point.-George 
R. Keiser, Kansas State University, Manhat-
tan. 

Mantovani, Giuseppe. New Communica-
tion Environments: From Everyday to 
Virtual. London, England, and Bristol, 
Penn.: Taylor & Francis, 1996. 152p. 
$69.95 cloth (ISBN 0-7484-0395-7); 
$29.95 paper (ISBN 0-7484-0396-5). LC 
96-20158. 

In graduate school, I had occasion to at-
tend a dinner party hosted by a re-
nowned poet and critic for several of his 



584 College & Research Libraries 

English department colleagues. At table, 
the festivities quickly settled down to that 
favorite of academic sports, disparaging 
colleagues. To a graduate student, the 
professors' witty contumely was as 
headily in-crowd as the wine fueling the 
proceedings was plentiful, and what 
struck me most about the verdicts ren-
dered was the lavishness of their displea-
sure with the work not of grant-fat chem-
ists, tycoon technocrats, or plodding 
engineers but, rather, of social scientists, 
who were, it appeared, guilty of piling 
up dull Himalayas of .research that 
turned out to be nothing more than the 
molehills of common sense that human-
ity daily treads underfoot. 

This conversation came to mind as I 
read social psychologist Mantovani' s 
(University of Padua) short discussion of 
current social psychological thinking 
about the relationship of communication 
and selfhood. Relying on the work of Lee 
Beach, James March, Donald Norman, 
Marshall Sahlins, and others, Mantovani 
looks at "how culture and technology to-
gether shape the situations we live in and 
influence the development of our social 
and individual identities." To do so, he 
redirects psychology's attention away 
from linear and cognitive models of com-
munication as information transfer, de-
cision-making as rationalistic execution 
of plans, and identity as given and dis-
crete toward multidimensional, dynamic, 
complex relations that describe the pro-
visional, contextualized, improvisatory, 
contradictory aspects of identity and the 
historically contingent, negotiated, 
hermeneutic, constructed nature of social 
meaning. 

The book's three parts revolve around 
part two's three-tiered model of social 
context. In this model, a level of tool-us-
ing (including all types of technology) 
involvement with the environment inter-
acts through a second level of daily situ-
ations-at which people form goals as 
interpretations of their interests and op-
portunities-with a third level where a 

November 1996 

system of meanings (i.e., social structure) 
is produced by the actions people take 
to achieve those goals. This "symbolic or-
der," the system that makes actions 
meaningful, turns back dialectically on 
the everyday level, however, as the lim-
iting repertory of its possibilities. 
Problematizing in this way the dynamic 
between identity and social context, ac-
tivity and symbolic order, everyday and 
"permanent," enables Mantovani to 
show how they are mutually constitutive, 
each establishing the conditions of pos-
sibility for the other, making and remak-
ing each other, as do the more homely 
nature/nurture, chicken/egg binaries 
customarily invoked to conceptualize 
dialectical dependence and doubts about 
causal priority. 

This model relies on part one's "situ-
ated action" theory of decision-making. 
According to this theory, people make 
(identity-creating) decisions not merely 
according to a so-called rationalist cal-
culation of advantage and disadvantage 
in order to achieve preplanned results 
but, more intuitively, to achieve results 
appropriate to their self-image in circum-
stances saturated with culturally avail-
able possibilities. Part three then uses the 
model to investigate the social implica-
tions of three new communication envi-
ronments, namely, computer-mediated 
communication, computer-supported 
work, and virtual reality. 

The conclusion worries two points. 
One is about the future of identity in a 
world whose reality is increasingly the. 
virtual one of circumstantial, fictional 
identities. The other is about the possi-
bilities for theory in scholarship that fo-
cuses on the overdetermined every day, 
an every day whose complexity not only 
eludes the reductionism toward which 
theory tends but subverts it by immers-
ing the "outside" of theoretical abstrac-
tion in the "inside" it would abstract. Al-
though the former of these may speak 
more directly to the library community, 
it is part three's critique of the "limita-



tions of the network paradigm," the 
"myth of electronic democracy," and the 
"supposed role of 'shared spaces' ... in 
the development of electronic altruism" 
that sounds cautionary notes especially 
close to home as librarians prepare 
despatialized collections for decor-
porealized constituencies in times when 
the new communities thus created will 
increasingly have to pay the Internet 
piper. 

Mantovani's tone is not so energeti-
cally critical as is, for example, Neil 
Postman's in Technology or Gorman and 
Crawford's in Future Libraries. His argu-
ment, however, reminds readers of what 
we already know so well, namely, that 
the technologies we make, make us in 
turn; that what we make has unpredict-
able consequences; that no tool is inher-
ently purposeful but, rather, takes its pur-
poses from the field of social values; and 
that technologies are social and therefore 
political projects. Technological tools, 
such as personal identity, develop in en-
gagement with an environment already 
conditioned by the political and social 
projects of people. Thus, as knowledge 
for Mantovani is not simply processed 
information, so, too, are technologies not 
neutral forces for progress; rather, their 
"cultural dimensions" require that we 
ask the political questions about who 
uses them and to what ends. 

The cover blurb promises a "startling" 
book. To those, however, who have fol-
lowed, especially through the cultural 
studies movement, the post-sixties devel-
opment of (Continental) social/ cultural 
theory on problems of agency, structure, 
subjectivity, discourse, language, power, 
ideology, and the every day or, for that 
matter, those who attend to the world 
around them, none of this will come as 
anything new, let alone startling. Read-
ers will find the summaries in the short 
introduction and conclusion useful, as 
they will the discussion of the sociopo-
litical imbrications of technology; but 
gaining instruction from the whole may 

Book Reviews 585 

depend not only on their reading or pow-
ers of observation but also on how they 
like their (virtual?) reality-in the form 
of the novel or social psychology, or in 
the imitation of fiction or description of 
science. That the author's most vivid evi-
dence in part one derives from works of 
literature or anecdotes of student life and 
that he proposes to ontologize virtual re-
ality as fiction remind me of Aristotle's 
assertion that poetry (roughly, literature) 
is more philosophical and serious than 
history because it is more universal. I 
might venture the corollary that litera-
ture, on these counts, shows itself supe-
rior to social psychology as welL-Rob-
ert Kieft, Haverford College, Haverford, 
Pennsylania . 

Miller, Steven E. Civilizing Cyberspace: 
Policy, Power, and the Information Su-
perhighway. New York: ACM Pr., 1996. 
413p. $24.95. (ISBN 0-201-84760-4.) LC 
95-7270. 

This has been a good year for public de-
bate about the information superhigh-
way. Dullish topics such as telecommu-
nications technology, regulation and 
licensing of public utilities, antitrust, 
copyright, and patent law have pen-
etrated the consciousness of the average 
person, the media, and possibly even 
some legislators. Along with perennially 
exciting problems of censorship and pri-
vacy and the politics of the Supreme 
Court and the 104th Congress, they make 
an exciting agenda for democratic discus-
sion. Steven E. Miller is one of those rare 
people who combine detailed knowledge 
of both the technical and the political 
sides of these issues. He has been a com-
munity organizer, editor of Lotus Maga-
zine, science commentator for the TV 
show One Norway Street, and member of 
the national board of Computer Profes-
sionals for Social Responsibility. In Civi-
lizing Cyberspace, Miller offers a valuable 
overview aimed at knowledgeable citi-
zens and policymakers. "Question and 
Answer" sessions with experts (scien-