reviews 582 College & Research Libraries November 1997 rate structure); bringing search engines to current stored electronic data; creat- ing systems to capture and index elec- tronic documents; and developing im- aging systems. These suggestions are indeed useful starting points, but the descriptions are insufficient as guide- lines for planning their implementation. Ultimately, the usefulness of this work will be in its presentation of current is- sues and the accessibility of Megill’s ar- guments for rethinking corporate records issues. It is particularly appropriate for records managers, archivists, and librar- ians faced with persuading information- illiterate corporate or institutional person- nel to change or implement records poli- cies.—Jan Blodgett, Davidson College. Sardar, Ziauddin, and Jerome R. Ravetz. Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway. New York: New York Univ. Pr., 1996. 161p. $45, cloth (ISBN 0-8147-8059-8); $16.95, pa- per (ISBN 0-8147-8058-X). LC 96- 19794. Rising from academic obscurity in the space of just a few years, the Internet is fast becoming a public information system of global proportions. That this has occurred rather rapidly is an un- derstatement; it is as if “the telephone, television, and the private automobile had all developed simultaneously, and in a matter of months rather than de- cades.” We must ask how this new tech- nology will affect culture and society in the years to come, but it is an arduous task, the editors claim. In fact, accord- ing to the editors, in the grip of Internet technological enthusiasm and hype, it is all but impossible to come to any sen- sible conclusions about the Internet’s future—the volume’s ostensible topic. So the editors abandon this project at the beginning, preferring, instead, to unpack the “underlying assumptions and values of the cyberspace revolu- tion that is unfolding before our eyes.” They offer this collection of essays to sees the role of middle managers mov- ing away from controlling or limiting in- formation and toward coordinating and adding value. The strength of this book lies in its clear synthesis of records management issues and descriptions of technological changes in the workplace. Included are discussions on records retention policies; analysis of information use; explanations of relational and inverted index systems, SGML, the Internet and the World Wide Web, and scripts; and descriptions of train- ing programs. Although Megill openly acknowledges that portions of the book are based on Carlos A. Cuadra’s The Cor- porate Memory and the Bottom Line (1994) and a paper presented by Judith Wanger at the Online Conference in 1995, he also provides an excellent summary of a wide range of recent research. Moreover, he presents cogent arguments for an inte- grated approach to documentation while acknowledging the contributions already made by the separate disciplines of records management, archives, and li- brary science. However, the concept of documentation strategy used here relies more on standard records retention ap- praisals than on the perspective of archi- val documentation outlined in Helen Samuels’s Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities (1992). An- notated bibliographies at the end of each chapter offer practical pointers to more detailed histories and analyses, and high- lighted sections give easy access to sta- tistics on the costs of lost documents and to useful summaries of records concepts. The weakest points of the book are the attempts to provide practical guid- ance in appraisal and in starting corpo- rate memory programs. The discussion of rules of worth remains at the level of an overview and is too conditional to truly assist in the design of viable re- tention periods. The suggestions for starting a program include interview- ing key employees (who may work at any or all levels of the current corpo- Book Reviews 583 “question the absolute faith that is be- ing exhibited in the goodness of cybertechnologies and their ability to enhance the quality of life.” That is a worthy goal, as anyone remotely con- cerned with the Internet will readily agree. What can librarians learn from this study? In short, this volume serves up a lot of juicily caustic critiques and provokes thought but, ultimately, tells more about the limitations of the type of scholarship that underlies the volume (it is called “cultural studies”) than it does about the Internet’s hidden as- sumptions. One reason, as the reader will see, is that the authors make the same mistake that enthusiasts do: They greatly exaggerate the scale and scope of the network’s impact. A second rea- son is that the authors use a particu- larly unconvincing analytical method which does little to reassure a skeptical reader that the inferences drawn are anything more than mere opinion. The centerpiece of the volume is Sardar’s “alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West.” A coau- thor of Barbaric Others (1993), Sardar writes extensively on information technology, third-world issues, and Islam, a subject factory that one would think would be quite capable of manufacturing vitriol in its pur- est form—and Sardar does not disappoint. The fundamental contradiction of West- ern culture, Sardar suggests, is its Janus- faced presentation of “projected inno- cence, standard-bearer of civilization, the enforcer of universal law and morals,” coupled with a darker side, a “psychotic inner reality” of the “pathologically un- tamed.” On the one hand, the West gives us universal declarations of human rights; on the other, it is a dominator culture bent on opening new territories and filling them, genocidally, with adventurers, perverts, and butchers of the innocent. For Sardar, cyberspace is the West’s newest New World, a new frontier in which the its Ja- nus-faced tendencies are abundantly evi- dent. For every communitarian working to extend cyberspace access in the ser- vice of political equality, Sardar suggests, there is a Jake Baker running around with his literary sword, hacking up female class- mates in alt.sex.stories. And as cyberspace grows, it absorbs, appropri- ates, and, ultimately, trivializes anything non-Western by forcing it to become a representation of itself in terms ultimately dictated by the network’s underlying West- ern assumptions. For Sardar, the Internet is simply the latest form of Western impe- rialism, an apparently benign, but ulti- mately destructive, force that non-West- ern countries would be wise to resist. This argument is one that undoubtedly will strike a respondent chord in France, where the Internet is seen with great alarm as the avenue by which Hollywood and Mickey Mouse will finally be able to crush the French literature and language, but it is surely overstated: The network’s cur- rent English bias reflects the fact that ap- proximately 90 percent of all IP addresses are located in English-speaking countries, although this is changing rapidly. For me, the argument that the Internet is a colo- nizing force on the order of Western colo- nial expansion mistakes the network’s cur- rent Anglocentrism for an enduring trend and badly misrepresents its likely future evolution on an international scale. Sardar’s argument is likely to find its most welcome reception among fundamental- ist and totalitarian third-world regimes, considering their palpable fear that Internet connectivity will undermine to- talitarian control. Ravetz’s “The Microelectronics Revo- lution and the Dialectics of Ignorance” serves up its caustic cocktail from neo- Marxism. Although previous technologi- cal revolutions have created dramatic changes in social empowerment by al- tering access to the means of produc- tion, cyberspace will bring a differentia- tion of consciousness: Whereas some experience “ever more intoxicating powers,” those who are not connected will sink deeper into hopelessness. The 584 College & Research Libraries November 1997 ist and your politics become Libertar- ian. If the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Web site starts sporting Microsoft’s banner ads, sells its demo- graphics to direct marketers, and links to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, I sup- pose I will have to concede that Sobchak is right—but do not count on it. There are other essays in the book, but what I have described thus far serves to illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the cultural stud- ies approach that informs much of the volume. The method boils down to pos- iting some type of horrifyingly unjust, underlying structure that you think tends to manifest in all the various prod- ucts of Western culture, and then to select some things you have heard about the Internet that seem to echo this pattern. As a method, this pattern- matching, Marx-alluding technique pro- vides the touchstone for interesting, thought-provoking, and often madden- ing creative writing projects. The results can be amusing, too, thanks in part to the unintentionally hilarious overstate- ments (e.g., “Prepare for holographic Slashers to break out of ’alt.sex.stories’ and stalk the earth”). At the end of the day, though, you really do not know any- thing more about the Internet’s hidden assumptions, or how the network is likely to shape society in the years to come.—Bryan Pfaffenberger, University of Virginia. Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Ed. Sven Birkerts. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf (Graywolf Forum, 1), 1996. 261p. $16 (ISBN 1-55597-248-9). LC 96- 75790. Many librarians, as they watch the gradual migration of their collections from print to electronic form, experience some unease over a question few actu- ally verbalize: What influence does the medium through which our culture passes have on the ability and willing- ness of readers to engage in dialog with result will be sabotage and terrorism, coupled with the loss of civil liberties as governments crack down. I frankly do not see how the chaotic and varied as- semblage of fact, opinion, marketing hype, and loonyism that currently con- stitutes the “knowledge” available on the Internet could possibly confer “ever more intoxicating powers.” Admittedly, the ability to access Internet “knowl- edge” (or more to the point, to differen- tiate between online trash and treasure) may make some slight contribution to career success in the years to come, but the strategic value of Internet access surely pales before the real determi- nants of class differentiation in Western society (class, race, and differential ac- cess to high-quality education). Turning to the “democratic possibili- ties” of electronic media technologies, Sobchak (“Democratic Franchise and the Electronic Frontier”) begins by not- ing, in the term franchise, the conflation of the right to political participation and the exclusive rights of commercial en- terprises to sell products in a certain area. For most of us, the term’s two meanings might seem accidental, an artifact of intersecting word histories, but for Sobchak, they testify to an un- derlying cultural conflation of political liberalism and capitalism that pops up in anything American do. This conflation signals a contradiction between politi- cal freedom and monopoly capitalist domination, Sobchak says, which lies at the heart of American culture. But, of course, this is not recognized: It is mys- tified by its reappearance at the super- structural level in the notion of free- market competition. The Internet re- peats this pattern, she says, by offering what appears to be enhanced political participation blended with a healthy free market, but this masks the areas of contestation between political free- dom and capitalist domination, and to the extent that you buy into this, you become a numb, apathetic consumer- << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /All /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Warning /CompatibilityLevel 1.3 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.0000 /ColorConversionStrategy /CMYK /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 1 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness false /PreserveHalftoneInfo true /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts false /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages false /ColorImageMinResolution 151 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.10000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages false /GrayImageMinResolution 151 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.10000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages false /MonoImageMinResolution 600 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.16667 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile () /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /ENU (IPC Print Services, Inc. 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