- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books; New edition edition (20 April 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0465089852
- ISBN-13: 978-0465089857
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.7 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,225,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Anarchist in the Library
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Erudite, eloquent, imaginative and personable all at once, The Anarchist in the Library will become not only the ur-text in an increasingly important field, but also the one that is certainly the most fun to read". Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?"
Product Description
A radical new take on the coming battle over information - based on a new social structure that is as old as gossip, but which thanks to the internet, is just coming to town From Napster to Total Information Awareness to flash mobs, the ongoing debate over the role of information technology in our lives has revolved around a single question: how closely does cyberspace conform to the accustomed rules and behaviour patterns of the real world, and how much do we want it to conform? Siva Vaidhyanathan enters this debate with a seminal new insight: while we've been busy debating how to make cyberspace imitate the world, the world has been busy imitating cyberspace. More and more of our social, political and religious activities are modelling themselves after the World Wide Web. A committed anarchist, Vaidhyanathan shows how the key information structure of our time is the 'peer-to-peer network'. These networks have always existed - gossip is one example, as is word-of-mouth advertising - but with the rise of electronic communication, they are suddenly coming into their own. And they are drawing the outlines of a battle for information that will determine much of the culture and politics of our century. Everything from culture to terrorism and extremist politics, to religion will be affected. The Anarchist in the Library is a radically original look at how this battle defines on of the major fault lines of 21st century civilization.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ignore the subtitle - this is a thoughtful and well-researched book. It begins with a potted history of anarchism and tries to place current debates about intellectual property within the context of the historical struggle between freedom and control, or anarchy and oligarchy. Peer-to-peer networks are labelled anarchic while the music and movie industries are oligarchic. However, after a promising start the book loses direction, bringing globalization, terrorism and genomics into the picture without much to tie them together other than the fact that they all involve information and control. At times the book seems like a collection of unrelated essays which have been sprinkled with the words "anarchy", "oligarchy" and "peer-to-peer". Nevertheless it's worth reading if you are interested in the politics of information, and the bibliography is excellent.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
13 reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
EXCELLENT! and very enjoyable....
23 May 2004
Format:Hardcover
This book is so full of information and ideas that it seems almost impossible to do justice to them all. In discussing the parallels between vast and possibly ungovernable world of the internet, and the complexity of idea exchange in the real world, Dr. Vaidhyanathan broadens the discussion of Internet and file sharing policies. While I am personally interested in the future of the music industry, I found the book most compelling as it discusse the theories and rationales behind our systems of governing intellectual property. Dr. Vaidhyanathan's book covers not only the ideologies behind Napster, but also issues of copyright law, public libraries, online political dissent, hackers, the effect of Limp Bizkit in the music industry and more.
Ultimately, Dr. Vaidhyanathan is a humanist, and that propels both the idea behind his book and his accessible, fluent writing style. Instead of offering easy answers to convoluted problems The Anarchist in the Library delves deeper into the social theories that motivate our laws and attempts to govern information exchange--both in the real world and the virtual one. Should we be willing to sacrifice human connection in order to hook up every human to the internet? Do we want a strict copyright law that works as a censoring device? Isn't anarchy in music the norm, rather than a recent technological development?
You will close this book with questions, but that is a good thing. It will encourage you to learn and debate more about a variety of subjects that initially seemed to complicated to consider. This, along with Dr. Vaidhyanathan's first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, is a must for anyone interested in communication, globilization and Internet studies in the 21st century.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Very important and very timely---yet very readable!
4 May 2004
Format:Hardcover
Siva Vaidhyanathan has written another book that (again!) establishes him as one of the sharpest young media thinkers emerging on the cultural scene. An American Studies scholar by training, Vaidhyanathan has an interdiscipliniary background that is everywhere apparent in his approach to complex, sprawling issues such as copyright (as in his excellent first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs) and now in the perplexities of digitality, the subject of his new title, The Anarchist in the Library.
Issues of privacy, intellectual property, creative freedom... this book pokes the major sore spots throbbing underneath our blithely digital epoch, though it does so in unexpected ways.This not the same old "paint by numbers" approach to cultural studies in which a problem is identified, denounced, and remedied (in the abstract) by a few cursory nods toward the self-evident.
Rather, this book takes unexpected turns that never lose the reader's interest or passion. Perhaps this is because Vaidhyanathan is blessed (or cursed by those academics suspicious of such fluency) with an inviting prose style that adds considerable charm to even his most polemical passages---this fluency may be why he is finding such success as a public intellectual, appearing in the pages of Salon, NY Times, etc., as well as on television and the net (he is a well-known blogger at www.sivacracy, one of the few I read outside of Eric Alterman's).
Bottom line: I'm teaching an Honors course on Media Studies next year and I expect to use this book with my students---it seems ideally pitched for both serious students and general readers alike.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
George's review
9 May 2004
Format:Hardcover
In "The Anarchist in the Library", Dr. Vaidhyanathan progressively and analytically demonstrates through historical and contemporary cultural examples how our "information age" is evolving. This is an essential read, because its scope is imperitive to all citizens. It is empowering, because it is thought provocative long after you put it down, and places primacy on you- the individual and your future. Lastly, it is very enjoyable, because the author accomplishes all this with a highly personable prose that somehow manages to incorporate technical facts and daily, highly relevant examples to reinforce his thesis.
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