reviews 100 College & Research Libraries sues. This effort will not satisfy librarians but will be useful to academic adminis­ trators grappling with the general issues the papers in this compilation consider. This is a sometimes enlightening, fre­ quently muddled, and often insightful collection that should be available in any research library collection. Above all, it is a provocative case of special pleading for one possible alternative future for Ameri­ can higher education. It is a suitable com­ panion volume to the more conceptually integrated work of Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Poli­ tics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial Uni­ versity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1997, reviewed in C&RL, vol. 59, no. 3).—Lee Shiflett, Louisiana State University. Social Dimensions of Information Technology: Issues for the New Millennium. Ed. G. David Garson. Hershey, Penn.: Idea Group, 2000. 362p., $79.95 paper (ISBN 1-878-28986-1). LC 99-88003. When Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1973, he cre­ ated almost overnight a sense not only among many social scientists, but also in much of society at large, that the world had radically and inalterably changed. The end of the industrial age and the ad­ vent of something new—then as yet ill defined only as “post-industrial”—re­ sulted from what Bell called the new “in­ tellectual technologies” developing around the computer. Founding a para­ digm that echoes loudly even today, Bell held that these technologies were dra­ matically discontinuous with all earlier information-processing and management systems. If let blossom, they would result in a new age of progress and wealth in­ validating and transcending all the laws of political economy. Since these heady first years of the in­ formation age, comparable in their boundless optimism to the short-lived “Atomic Age” of the 1950s and 60s, soci­ ologists, political economists, and, of course, members of the many new “knowledge professions” (among whom may or may not be librarians) have all January 2001 been asking whether postindustrial soci­ ety has indeed superseded what went be­ fore. Bill Gates and other utopians, of course, encourage us to answer this ques­ tion with a full-throated yes! Less starry-eyed (or self-interested?) contem­ poraries, among them the presiding judge in U.S. v. Microsoft, Thomas Penfield Jack­ son, see in the commodification of infor­ mation and the rapid advance of com­ puter networks as delivery systems for this new merchandise just the latest ex­ pansion of the marketplace—one that has created the most extraordinarily produc­ tive site for capital accumulation in history, but which, for that very reason, requires intense government scrutiny. In this view, the emphasis on “discontinuity” is just a smoke screen for those seeking profit, and the old laws and criticisms of unbridled capitalism still apply with no less strin­ gency than when other breakthrough tech­ nologies became “commodified” in the past, among them the steam locomotive, the automobile, and the telephone. So do we stand at the dawn of a great new age, or is it business as usual? Or, to ask a subsidiary question relevant to most readers of these pages: Are we librarians and the institutions we maintain likely victims of these changes—comparable to the port towns along the Ohio or Missis­ sippi that became ghost towns when the new railways began to route commerce past them, or is it just a matter of adapt­ ing our practices and services to the new technological realities within an un­ changed societal mandate? We count on sociologists to help us gain some quasi-historical distance from the present even as we are experiencing it, and it was therefore with some hope of enlighten­ ment—reinforced by the immoderate sub­ title “Issues for the New Millennium”— that this reviewer turned to the collection of essays gathered together here. The volume’s editor, G. David Garson, perhaps a bit too fulsomely introduced in the biographical notes as the author or editor of more than twenty books and fifty articles, is also the editor of Social Science Computer Review, where all twenty articles Book Reviews 101 of the present book were first published. Despite a relatively high institutional sub­ scription rate of more than $230 per year for this quarterly, Social Science Computer Review is widely held in North American academic libraries, with a total circulation of about a thousand. Further, its articles are indexed in several important elec­ tronic sources that researchers and stu­ dents regularly turn to, including INSPEC and the Social Sciences Citations Index. Pre­ sumably, the subscribing institutions would be the same ones that might oth­ erwise be interested in a collection of es­ says under such a title, but they own this information already. Nonsubscribing li­ braries can obtain the same articles on demand for their users. What, then, justi­ fies the reissue of these essays—or chap­ ters as they are called here—in the form of a monographic publication? Are they perhaps so fundamental that they deserve a more permanent form than that pro­ vided in the Social Science Computer Re­ view? No. As it turns out, most are snap­ shots of contemporary research, well suited perhaps for publication in a jour­ nal, but even after having been brushed up slightly for republication still by no means seminal, nor intended by their au­ thors to be such. Among the more inter­ esting articles in this collection are those Index to advertisers ACRL 112 Academic Press 9, 106 AIAA 5, 70 ATLA 10 CHOICE 69, 102 EBSCO cover 3 Elsevier Science 17, 19, 21, 103 Greenwood Publishing 43 Huntington Library Press 55 ISI cover 4 Library Technologies 2 netLibrary cover 2 OCLC 35 Salem Press 86 Science Direct 56, 57 Theatre Research Data Group 24 by Mark A. Shields on computer-based instruction (“Technological Change, Vir­ tual Learning, and Higher Education”) and John P. Robinson, Meyer Kestnbaum, and Andrew Kohut on the extent to which PC use has displaced other leisure activi­ ties (“Personal Computers, Mass Media, and Other Uses of Free Time”). These and a number of the other articles convey sig­ nificant research and insights. But to an extent even greater than in most collec­ tions of this type, the high standard they set is not maintained throughout. Indeed, for the purposes of this re­ view, it is especially unfortunate that the one essay in the collection that deals with the future of libraries directly, “Changing Roles in Information Dissemination and Education,” is exasperatingly superficial (two books by pop info science author Neil Postman and a 1984 issue of Network World are the only sources cited), poorly reasoned, and atrociously written and ed­ ited. If this judgment sounds too harsh, here is a brief sample that might stand for many others: “So, what then should the Library publish one [sic] the WWW? The Library cannot of course scan all of it’s [sic] books and other materials into machine-readable form and make them available on their [sic] WWW site for rea­ sons of money, time, and above all, copy­ right.” Another reason that might justify re­ publication in monographic form might be to facilitate course adoption at a col­ lege or university, but at $80, the price of this paperback volume is much too high. Perhaps the publishers felt that the value of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and, indeed, this is what char­ acterizes and justifies any good collection of essays, carefully assembled and intro­ duced by an editor illuminating a large and complex topic from a host of comple­ mentary perspectives. But the essays gathered here rarely talk to one another (nor, again, have they been asked to), as illustrated by a slapdash three-page in­ dex in which we find not only nebulous rubrics such as “social dimensions,” “server problems,” “persuasiveness,” 102 College & Research Libraries “world system,” and “boundaryless or­ ganization” (with but a single-page ref­ erence each), but also, inexcusably, sepa­ rate entries for “e-mail” and “electronic mail,” “World Wide Web” and “Web,” “mass media” and “national media,” all pointing in completely different direc­ tions. This speaks of haste and indiffer­ ence on the part of both editor and pub­ lisher. In sum, and for all sympathy with the authors of certain of the essays repub­ lished here, this book has little to recom­ mend it, adding a line to a vita some­ where, but otherwise only to the glut of redundantly published materials librar­ ies have to choose from. Perhaps before closing, let me add as a historical footnote that one of the earliest critical works on the social impact of in­ formation technology remains today one of the best, even twelve years after publi- January 2001 cation. In 1988, Canadian sociologist Vincent Mosco and his U.S. collaborator, media expert Janet Wasko, published fourteen original essays under the title The Political Economy of Information (Wis­ consin), including two superb introduc­ tory overviews by Mosco (“Information in the Pay-Per Society”) and Dan Schiller, now of U.C.-San Diego (“How To Think about Information”), and numerous other exciting contributions. Among other things, this reader had a comprehensive list of referenced authors (e.g., “Habermas, J., 23, 69, 73, 247-48, 272-73”) in addition to a six-page hierarchical sub­ ject index with cross-references (e.g. “Panopticon, see Surveillance”) to help its readers pull everything together. It is herewith commended to the careful atten­ tion of the editor and the publisher of the present volume.—Jeffrey Garrett, North­ western University.