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Lee Siegel

Against The Machine: Being Human in the Era of the Electronic Mob Paperback – 21 May 2008

by Lee Siegel (Author)

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Against the Machine is a fascinating look at how the Internet is reshaping the way we think about ourselves and the world. Siegel explores how the internet affects culture and social life, particularly the psychological, emotional and social cost of high-tech solitude. Arguing that the internet's widespread anonymity eliminates boundaries and encourages otherwise polite people to be downright abusive, Siegel discusses the half-fantasy, half-realism of online personae. By experiencing virtual selves rather than other individuals, we run the risk of being reduced to avatars that other internet users manipulate for their own ends. Insightful and written with convincing evidence to support the author?s polemic, this book is a welcome addition to the debate on the personal ramifications of living in a wired world.

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Serpent's Tail
Publication date

21 May 2008
Dimensions

13 x 1.4 x 19.9 cm
ISBN-10

1846686970
ISBN-13

978-1846686979
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Product details

Publisher : Serpent's Tail; Main edition (21 May 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 192 pages
ISBN-10 : 1846686970
ISBN-13 : 978-1846686979
Dimensions : 13 x 1.4 x 19.9 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 2,303,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 4,342 in Managers' Guides to Computing
- 5,472 in Amazon Online Shopping
- 22,311 in Cultural Studies

Customer reviews:
5 ratings

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Review

One of the country's most eloquent and acid-tongued cultural critics. (Deborah Solomon New York Times) The worldwide web is, for Siegel, essentially an optical illusion, an infinite hall of mirrors in which atomised, self-broadcasting individuals are really just staring at themselves (Prospect) This witty and intelligent polemic looks at how being online makes us more disconnected. (Scotland on Sunday) One of the heroic few. (Guardian)

To read him is to be reminded of what criticism used to aspire to in terms of
range, learning, high standards, and good writing and - dare one say it? - values.

(David Rieff) In every case, Siegel is wildly and satisfyingly unpredictable. (Janet Malcolm) --Guardian

Savour his vigorous prose, and prepare to be surprised (Pete Hammill) --Pete Hammill

Siegel is a zigzagging cultural omnivore... a confrontational enthusiast... an expert demolisher of critical group-think (New York Observer) --New York Observer

About the Author

The author of Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television, Lee Siegel is a cultual
commentator and art critic. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Amazon Customer

Vwry cheap and good content. I had it on my reading list

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2017

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Vwry cheap and good content. I had it on my reading list. I am studying a Media degree in University.

Helpful

Vp Campbell

A Cyber-Pessimist tract of some merit

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 July 2008

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Lee Siegel is one of those people who've been caught out in their use of new media, and there's a mean-spirited streak throughout this book that reflects that somewhat. (After receiving hideously abusive comments about his work, and getting no support from his editors, he went online anonymously to put some positive comments about himself to counter the criticism and got found out). Many of his targets in the book seem to be simply competition for the large audience for popular social science (people like Douglas Rushkoff and Malcolm Gladwell) rather than real academic analysts of the pros and cons of the internet, and he's rather too simplistic in his dismissal of scholars like Lawrence Lessig and Jay Rosen as self-interested 'internet boosters'. His claim that there's no real criticism of the internet, is only partly true and mostly about news media, and ignores a whole tranch of cyber-scepticism and cyber-pessimism in the academic literature on the subject, from which he might have learned a lot to strengthen his position.

As a scholar of journalism and political communication, who has looked at new media too, however, some of his core criticisms of the internet, are to my mind spot on. His comments about how no-one would delight in 'citizen heart surgeons' but seem eager to talk about 'citizen' journalists is absolutely right. A levelling of access to public communication does not equal a levelling of public competence to communicate and celebrating that as democratisation in action, as so many people (including many academics) have done, is naive at best, dangerous at worst. (It's simple technological determinism; the ability to click on a mouse, and type comments on a webpage- just like I'm doing now- is transformed into the ability to make a cogent, coherent contribution.) The debate over whether the internet leads to homgeneity or heterogeneity is a central one in academic debates, but certainly the case that Siegel makes here too (alongside his excoriation of American Idol and its ilk) has some weight and validity to it. The final main point about the shift from valuing knowledge (which takes time, effort, and ability to acquire that not everyone has) to valuing information (which the internet makes immediate, relatively effortless, and relatively ability free) is also one that has validity. I too cannot see the real merit of technologies that allow anyone to say anything about anything, regardless of what they know, and it be treated as equally valid as what anyone else says (Wikipedia this means you). As Siegel says, viewing this as democratising, turns expertise into something to be shunned, abhorred and derided, in favour of the immediate, the spontaneous, the ill-considered, the trivial and the opinionated. How, in the end, can this better than, or preferable too, all the undoubted flaws and limitations of 'big' media?

This book is really a primer for getting into ways of critiquing the internet, but ironically perhaps, given Siegel's defence of expertise, it's not in books like this that you'll find the debates getting to the real heart of the issues. For that you need to go to the expert, academic literature (consider for instance Gordon Graham's 'The Internet a Philosophical Inquiry', or Margolis and Resnick's 'Politics as Usual'). Still there's enough invective here to keep the blogosphere happy (or angry) for a while.

7 people found this helpful

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Prof. G. SPORTON

Human possibility devoted to commercial greed, or freedom of expression in new forms...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 January 2011

This is an intriguing book, ostensibly about the impact of the Internet on culture, but really a rant about the absence of authoritative voices to make a critical, disinterested analysis of the mania of popularity that the Internet has either promoted or reflects. To that extent, Siegel is as guilty of posturing and asserting as the targets of his criticism, and the result is a fairly lightweight personal vindication of how he can see through the tricks of commerce and the conformism of the mob.

This is a shame, as there is an excellent argument at the bottom of this: the substitution of sentience for the exchange value of immediate experience. The sinister implication of Siegel's Internet is that it uses all human possibility solely for its commercial potential, and that potential is measured entirely by a popularity whose premise cannot be verified. The distortion of democracy into a concept used by Siegel's targets as a justification of their expansion into all forms of life is a very serious issue indeed, and invoked all too frequently in the behaviour of irresponsible or corrupt governmental and corporate conduct. But this is where Siegel's thesis does not quite add up: does the behaviour in the blogosphere or the actions of those offering themselves up for reality television only reflect the aspirations of sinister corporate types who just want to empty our pockets? To what extent does the Internet and the other aspects of mass culture that Siegel objects to represent the free expression of the individual? This is a complex problem, but Siegel is guilty of treating it lightly, in a book whose heavyweight questions are given lightweight treatment in less than 200 pages and whose subject leaps about wildly. Neither the Internet or television, Siegel's two pet targets, are monolithic in their content or the experience of them, and this is an unsubtle and partial account of both.

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