| Subject: Hardie advice on book review |
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kirk
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Date Posted: 17:40:07 03/10/02 Sun
You cover the book well and you identify the
author's sources which is useful. You could say more about why you
found it useful if you wanted or what other areas it made you want to
explore further.
Your footnotes would be better in parentheses () in the appropriate
places in your text , eg (Levinson , 1997, pp12-14).
My book review: Soft Edge
Book Review: Soft Edge
Title: The Soft Edge
Author: Paul Levinson
Publisher: Routledge
Copyright: 1997
ISBN: 0-415-15785-4
Pages: 257
Price: $20.00
Rating: 88%
Soft Edge is a book about a meaningful journey of a past and present communication media we already know and a future under way, with every focus toward exploring how information technology helped bring them all into being. According to Paul Levinson, the author of this book, information is intangible and indeed our life operates on information. One of his profound theories on media evolution is that all media will eventually facilitate communication more humanly just like the way human thinks “naturally”. Such a thoughtful yet provocative theory clearly demonstrate Levinson’s gift of illuminating the uncreative and uninteresting insights.
Levinson is also the President and founder of Connected Education, an organization that has been offering graduate courses on the Internet for more than a decade. He is the author of Mind at Large (1988), Electronic Chronicles (1992), and Learning Cyberspace (1995). Levinson's more popular essays on the media have appeared in Wired and The Village Voice. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems and teaches Communications at Hofstra University.
Basically, Soft Edge is intended for interest groups such as students who are pursuing media studies, scientists, researchers, philosophizers, policy makers and every thoughtful reader. Most of the information in this book covered interesting theories based on Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and Donald T. Campbell (1916-1996), philosophy from Karl Popper (1902-1992), as well as science fiction guide from Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). In addition this book also consist well-research documents with important references and the topic is covered extensively.
Levinson commences his book with a brief description of some of the evolutionary dynamics of information technology. Hard and soft determinism, human control of media as well as environment influences were among the useful technologies that profoundly impact our existence. According to Levinson, constant assertion of human rationality is in the end what makes the information revolution different from the biological revolution of natural selection. At every turn, the impact of every medium is subject to an audience of human appraisal, expressed not only in ideas but in the behavior of utilizing a medium or not. With the profoundly unintended consequences of any information technology, coupled with our capacity to appraise and perhaps adjust for its effect, Levinson then guide us through the first stop in our history of the information revolution.
In chapter 2, Levinson attempt to discover why is the move from polytheism to monotheism failed when attempted by the pharaoh Ikhnaton, yet took solid root among the Hebrews who were taken out of Egypt by Moses only about 150 years later? The Pharaoh’s hieroglyphic failure and the Hebrews’ alphabetic success in conveying the monotheistic idea is the story of this chapter.
Next, Levinson gives us the most fundamental human trait: the printing authorship. Here we witness the printing press made the Protestant Reformation possible by making available of the first Gutenberg printed bible that Luther urges people to read the bible themselves. Chapter 3 also guides us through the consideration of “how printing press helped bring the modern age of national states, the scientific revolution, public education, democracy, capitalism and religious diversification into being”.
Chapter 4 - 10 introduces the media transformation begin with the immaculate invention of photograph and telegraphy in the age of invention and follow their development, other notable invention such as telephone, electric lighting, radio, television as well as computer age begin to knock onto our life barely more than a decade ago. In these chapters, Levinson lead us by looking not only at it corrected but at how those corrections transformed the world they were fitted upon. Such lessons would hold in store for the continuing information revolution in our own century. One of the profound view by Levinson on media transformation is new medium doesn't necessarily displace the old so much as it expands it. Instead, the old medium may be pushed into a niche in which it can perform better than the new medium and where it will survive. Radio is one of those old mediums. According to Levinson, radio may be dethroned as the central medium, it still managed to transform itself into a very different kind of medium in terms of the information delivers. Such transformation continues until today as the most profitable medium, especially in United States.
The personal computer and its extension is a medium equivalent excellence for facilitating both reading and multi-tasking. In the next succeeding 5 chapters, Levinson pointed to us the five aspects of this revolution before our eyes: word processing, online publishing, hypertext, its implementation on the web and the role of icons and images in these processors. An advantage of closely looking at such invention is those emergences is in abundant evidence all around us, and often object to our direct, personal experience.
Finally in the last few chapters, Levinson round up the book by looking completely at the media futures of paper, intellectual property, artificial intelligence and to the return to the beginning of the media, literally at us and what aspect of human communication and information processing are likely to survive and transcend the foreseeable evolution of media.
In conclusion, Levinson clearly display his information logically by first giving us the history of the media, which is based on the initial first ten chapters. Then Levinson devotes the second half of the book to our present digital revolution, from word processing to the Internet and beyond. All in all, the choice of words is elementary to those who great knowledge in the history of media while beginners like me who does not have in-depth knowledge of the history will have to read a few times before fully comprehensive the logical question posted by Levinson. Finally, with the positive responses from major online bookstore, magazines, library journals, as well as universities, Levinson’s Soft Edge has indeed reach out to many of its fans on its brilliant and exciting study of history, present and future media.
Paul Levinson, “ The First Digital Medium ”, Soft Edge, pp 12-14
“ Electricity ”, Soft Edge, pp 70-71
“ Survival of the Media Fit ”, Soft Edge, pp 91
“ Word Processing and Its Masters ”, Soft Edge, pp 124
“ The Online Authors as Publisher and Bookstore ”, Soft Edge, pp 127
“ Hypertext and Author/reader inversions ”, Soft Edge, pp 136
“ The open web and its enemies ”, Soft Edge, pp 160
“ Twentieth-Century Screens ”, Soft Edge, pp 163
“ Twentieth-Century Screens ”, Soft Edge, pp 172
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