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Borges 2.0: From Text to VirtualWorldsMark Addis aa Faculty of Media, Performance and English ,Birmingham City University , Perry Barr, Birmingham,B42 2SU, UKPublished online: 22 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Mark Addis (2009) Borges 2.0: From Text to VirtualWorlds, Information, Communication & Society, 12:7, 1120-1121, DOI:10.1080/13691180903100185

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BOOK REVIEWS

David Wright, Serge Gutwirth, Michael Friedewald, Elena Vildjiounaite & YvesPunie (eds), Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence. Series: The InternationalLibrary of Ethics, Law and Technology (Springer, 2008), Vol. 1, XXXIII, 291 pp.,ISBN: 978-1-4020-6661-0, Hardcover, £91.00, $159.00.

In the near future, the combination of networks, databases and monitoring devicesaround us will reach critical mass. Suddenly it will be possible for systems to antici-pate our wishes, where we have been used to coping in an anonymous way. The filmMinority Report presents such a scenario: as we walk past a shop window, the displayrecognizes us, and offers us services based on previous purchasing. We have justbenefited from ambient intelligence, also known as ubiquitous computing.

The editors of this book present this in four scenarios. Such an approach willbe known to anyone who has watched an information technology sales pitch: the5 or 10 min informercial that shows people going about their lives and findingthat everything they need is miraculously assisted by a new technologyservice. The editors have played with the scenario approach to describe thingsthat could go wrong, such as the bus load of elderly tourists who experience atragedy after a traffic accident when their medical monitors do not properly inte-grate into the health services monitoring in the country they are visiting. Thebook grew out of a project on Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence,which began in February 2005 with funding from the European Commission.

The book takes the discussion a step further: not just the long-standingtheme that things may go wrong with technology, but when they do, what isthe legal status of the individual affected? It is an interesting if at times, denseexamination of the question (particularly in the legal sections when thewriters are essentially cataloguing the steps required to initiate a legal case). Itis an alternative to utopian or dystopian approaches to technology which leavethe reader without any additional tools to tackle the challenges. The editorsalso include a section on recommendations for policy makers.

This book sits solidly within the tradition of privacy thinking that guided theadoption of European directives over the past couple of decades. It addresses the‘regulation versus voluntary market-driven safeguards’ (Europe versus USA)debate. Having said this, the work is heavily influenced by the work of two

Information, Communication & Society Vol. 12, No. 7, October 2009, pp. 1119–1125

ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13691180902866018

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US writers, Lessig (1999), on the legal implications of technology decisions, andSchneier (2000), on societal aspects of security.

My personal favourite observation in the book is that, ‘By the year 2017,there will have been significant technological advances, but this scenario positsthat there will have been little evolution in business ethics, management practicesand public awareness’ (p. 109). The challenge in this field is underlined by thebook’s call for Europe to go ‘full steam ahead’ with ambient intelligence ‘inorder to remain competitive against our rivals in the United States, Japan,Korea and elsewhere’ (p. 8).

While the book is obviously the work of many people, the editors have donea masterful job of weaving it into a readable and thought-provoking discussion ofwhat is becoming an increasingly important area.

Greg Adamson# 2009 Greg Adamson

References

Lessig, L. (1999) Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Books, New York.Schneier, B. (2000) Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, Wiley Com-

puter Publishing, New York.

Dr Greg Adamson is the Australian chair of the Society on Social Implications

of Technology, a chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

(IEEE), and co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Web Portals. His

research has primarily addressed the societal impacts of Internet technology.

[email: greg.adamson@anz.com]

Perla Sasson-Henry, Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds (New York: Peter Lang,2007), xþ125 pp., ISBN 9780820497143, £29.40.

Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds investigates Jorge Luis Borges’s stories ‘TheLibrary of Babel’, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, and ‘The Interloper’ from theperspectives of literature, science, and digital technology. The two primaryaspects of the book are an analysis of how these writings are connected toscience and technology, and an interpretation of how science and the digitalworld can be utilized to create new readings of his work. It opens with an exam-ination of the role which computers have in the humanities with particular refer-ence to the advent of hypermedia in both its stand alone and networked forms.The relationship between Borges’s idea of forking paths and hyperlinks is devel-oped along with the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory and Eco’s

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theory of labyrinths to elucidate the significance of his writings for the digital age.The stories and internet are allied through the conception that both are hypertex-tual environments and labyrinthine in character. In a ramifying network Borges’swriting are articulated in terms of chaos and bifurcation theory as well as theconcept of ‘noise’. There is discussion of the affinities between his stories andhyperfiction with detailed attention being paid to writings by Stuart Moulthropand Natalie Bookchin. The book is intended to appeal to students of print anddigital literature as well as those in Latin American studies.

There has been a growth of interest in the connections between Borges’s textsand digital technology with Sasson-Henry’s book being one of several recent con-tributions to the field. Its scope, originality, and wide range of references make it auseful addition to the area. However, the book is somewhat eclectic but this isprobably to be expected given its avowedly broad focus in what is an emergentarea of study. The interpretations of Borges’s stories are carefully presented andare very largely reasonable if taken on their own terms. The links whichSasson-Henry postulates between his writings and digital technology are interest-ing but it is not clear whether it is appropriate to interpret Borges in this fashion.He was not a science fiction writer and it is debateable whether what he describes isintended to have a digital construal. Borges 2.0 is generally informative about digitalliterature and has much interesting detail as it utilizes a diverse range of literary,philosophical, scientific, and technical sources. As such it is worth consultingregardless of the view which one takes about how Borges should best be read.

Mark Addis# 2009 Mark Addis

Mark Addis is Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham City University. He is the

General Editor for the Philosophy Insights series at Humanities-Ebooks (www.

humanities-ebooks.co.uk). He has been a visiting scholar at the Department of

Philosophy at Georgia State University and is a visiting professor at the Institute

for Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University. Address: Faculty

of Media, Performance and English, Birmingham City University, Perry Barr,

Birmingham, B42 2SU, UK. [email: mark.addis@bcu.ac.uk]

Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (London:Sage, 2008), ISBN: 9781412907934 (hbk), £72.00.

The title of this book may seem familiar; have not we seen numerous treatmentsof telecommunications, media, networks and the like? Yet, in many ways,McQuire’s project is to unsettle the emerging sense of our subjective positionin the city and to consider the kind of city that appears as a result of the deepen-ing and embedded social and physical form of communication technologies.

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So what we have are strong continuities running from the legacy of keystonewritings, like those of Graham, Marvin, Boyer and Castells, combined withan attempt to provide a fresh theoretical perspective, to which I turn later inthis review. The Media City is then an in-depth analysis that draws upon amelange of psychoanalytical, sociological and cultural theory. These pointersare discursively applied to the cities that are familiar and yet perhaps also so dis-orientating to us. The overall effect is of a carefully plotted, comprehensive andbookish analysis of the mega and micro trends that have brought us to a point ofunease, disorientation and imbricated technology in the urban context.

A major challenge for books of this kind is the kind of cultural speed-uparound us which has left both theoretical and empirical treatments strugglingto keep-up. The implications of this are significant for any author setting outto provide a substantive or long-lasting contribution, particularly for book-length treatments on the subject. If we turn back to Boyer’s (1996) Cybercitiesor to Graham and Marvin’s (1996) Telecommunications and the City we can seehow the rapid formation of new technologies and their hyper-mobility has lefttheorists and social subjects reeling. But, no doubt, it is possible to overstatethis case and, as McQuire ably demonstrates, many of the benchmarks,themes and perspectives by which we understand urban socio-technical changecan be extracted from the antecedents of urban and sociological observation.

The search for a theoretical archive provides the basis of the book’s mostfundamental and potentially controversial statement about urban life. The nubof McQuire’s thesis is that an object, that we might name the media city, is gen-erated by a series of underlying conditions and technological shifts. To cut thisdown into a manageable chunk we might state the following. First, theprimacy of stability and physicality is reworked by the new velocities and imma-teriality of new technologies, media and the underlying economy itself. Second,our sense of perspective has been made multiple and is itself connected to a diz-zying array of other viewpoints offered through these technologies. Finally, themedia city arrives as a distinctive form as ‘relational space’ becomes culturallydominant. Yet this final statement belies, in my view, one of the book’s mainweaknesses, and this is its foundation on a rather nebulous and indeed familiarset of principles around simultaneity, ephemeral social connectivity and inter-action and the interpenetration of global and local perspectives. It is here thatI am much less clear that we are on genuinely new ground.

McQuire’s thesis relies on the signposts offered by Lash, Simmel, Baudelaireand Bauman among many others. Cultural acceleration, technological change andthe mixed realities of modern experience take their cue from the work of Castells,Sassen, Bauman and so on. The material arranged here is like a more theoreticallyengaged version of some of William Mitchell’s influential works (City of Bits andMeþþ) which, though terribly ‘zeitgeisty’, often felt like more of a trot throughthe here and now than the kind of reflective and ‘academic’ project needed tochart changes in motion. McQuire is keen on setting out a vision of an uncanny

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urbanism and domesticity in which machines, the fleeting phantasmagoria ofimages and liquid social relations unsettle conventional notions of sociality. But,again, I am not fully convinced that these arrangements are not provided for con-ceptually and terminologically by Castells and Bauman (painfully misspelt asBaumann throughout), to take two key examples.

After the opening theoretical gambit the book treads a more conventional butextremely well-crafted exegesis on the nature of the urban and its breaks and con-tinuities from early and contemporary analyses. Here we are re-introduced to thelabyrinthine nature of the urban under and after Haussmann’s physical restructur-ing of Paris, the auras and atmospheres of urban cinema and literature and tomodern projects of architecture and the virtual synthesis of urban spaces inmodern games and programming. My reading of this is more positive and, nodoubt to the frustration of the author, I was more convinced and enlightenedby this ‘half’ of the book in which cultural, media and sociological theories andhistories were woven more tightly and with only the occasional nod to relationalspace to concern us.

The Media City is undoubtedly an accomplished work and offers a substantialpiece of scholarship on topics that are undoubtedly of importance and much con-temporary interest. Despite my theoretical reservations my copy received gener-ous underscoring and annotation and much to return to that appeared quotable,succinct and insightful. McQuire is particularly eloquent in his presentation of thecomplex sense we have of ourselves and our urban condition as it connects with ablurred interweaving of the media and the physical in the urban environments weinhabit, hallucinate and virtually cross. Yet without a more critical foundationthere is a danger that the distractions and overawing nature of these observedchanges supplants a concern with the problems, dark spaces and, dare I say,social dangers represented by the destabilized sense of sociality that emerges.

Rowland Atkinson# 2009 Rowland Atkinson

References

Boyer, C. (1996) Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication,Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Graham, S. & Marvin, S. (1996) Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces,Urban Places, Routledge, London.

Rowland Atkinson, Reader, Department of Sociology, University of York, UK.

[email: ra530@york.ac.uk]

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Naomi S. Baron, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (New York:Oxford University Press, 2008) ISBN-13: 9780195313055, ISBN-10: 0195313054,$29.95.

This short review can hardly do justice to Always On: Language in an Online andMobile World by Naomi Baron, and to the enjoyment of reading it. Throughbrief historical accounts, anecdotes, and studies, Baron effectively weaves amulti-faceted view of the communication worlds of contemporary Americanyouth, and the prospects for language at a time of changing patterns of commu-nicating, writing and reading.

Baron begins with micro level examinations of new communicationbehaviours, primarily grounded in studies of university age students. Thesestudies of language, presentation of self, and interpersonal contact managementopen up for us the means to study the language of the ‘Always On’ age and theculture it sustains. The book avoids jargon, which could be a liability in the earlychapters on linguistic analysis of instant messaging (IM). Yet, as the author notes,there is a need for vocabulary on which ‘to hang our analysis’, and thus the ter-minology makes it possible to label and address the issues of utterances,sequences, chunking and breaks in IM texts. Throughout these analyses, thebook keeps to a remarkably readable style. Who would think that a paragraphwhich details differences in the number of coordinating conjunctions and utter-ance break pairs used by males and females would be so fascinating? And yet it is.We have been drawn into the mystery of online communication: What patternsexist in IM? Does IM match writing or speech? (Parts of both.) Do men IM dif-ferently from women? (Yes: men use it more like speech; women more likewriting.) We are given the vocabulary to talk about these patterns, and theopportunity to partake with the author in unravelling the mystery of languageuse in this new venue.

Around the middle of the book, the focus becomes wider, moving from IMto consider blogs, Facebook, mobile phones, and then taking us into the uses andplace of informal and formal language in contemporary society. The premise fordiscussion of the role of language, its impact on reading, and even the impact onour lives and interpersonal ties, stems from the ‘signal boosting’ capacity of com-puter technology to make change more intensified, widespread and rapid. A keyaspect of this change is summed up in the title of Chapter 8: ‘Whatever’. Therush of text and personal expression in ‘whatever’ form and order for ‘whatever’purpose wars with the formalism of official spellings, accepted turn taking beha-viours and established language rules. Baron identifies a ‘linguistic whateverism’(p. 169) attitude to contemporary expression. While she tries to hold back onspeaking out against this move, it is apparent that she feels that excuses of‘clock-driven’ language – quickly produced, unproofed, and uncorrected –are an inadequate base on which to build language practices. Yet, soon afterthis comment she acknowledges that most of us learn to fit the language style

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to the occasion, and that our online usage is still in the formative stage. We are atpresent setting the norms on what occasions are appropriate for online language.We do this by producing new language forms, monitoring responses we receiveto these forms, and sanctioning those who speak to us too freely via these newforms. As Baron shows throughout the book, we are always conscious of ourpresentation of self, and our language uses will, with practice, fit both us andour communication partners and venues.

By contrast with the ‘whatever’ of daily communication, the experience ofreading this book is like having a conversation with the author – it is leisurely,unhurried, scholarly, enlightening and satisfying. Is Baron demonstrating the bestof formal writing or the conversion to a ‘mobile’ style that sits somewherebetween text and speech? Whichever model, it fits the occasion very well.

Caroline Haythornthwaite# 2009 Caroline Haythornthwaite

Caroline Haythornthwaite is Professor at the Graduate School of Library and

Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research

examines how the Internet and computer media support and affect work, learn-

ing, and social interaction. Major publications include The Internet in Everyday

Life (2002, with Barry Wellman); Learning, Culture and Community in Online

Education: Research and Practice (2004, with Michelle M. Kazmer), and the Hand-

book of E-learning Research (2007, with Richard Andrews). Further details on her

work can be found at: http://haythorn.wordpress.com/. Address: Graduate

School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-

paign, 501 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. [email:

haythorn@illinois.edu]

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