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Title: The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System by Siva Vaidhyanathan ISBN: 0-465-08984-4 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 04 May, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: EXCELLENT! and very enjoyable....
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: George's review
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Very important and very timely---yet very readable!
Comment: 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.
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Title: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig ISBN: 1594200068 Publisher: The Penguin Press Pub. Date: 25 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig ISBN: 0375726446 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 22 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Laws of the Web : Patterns in the Ecology of Information by Bernardo A. Huberman ISBN: 0262582252 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet by Jessica Litman ISBN: 1573928895 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Leonardo's Laptop : Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies by Ben Shneiderman ISBN: 0262692996 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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