Gonzo readings and 'in your face' rants

HIGH NOON ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER Edited by Peter Ludlow MIT Press 520pp, Pounds 42.50 ISBN 0 262 12196 4 (hbk) Pounds 19.95, ISBN 0 262 62103 7 (pbk)

Well that old cowpoke Peter Ludlow has sure assembled a mean posse of cyberdudes to tell us all about the Electronic Frontier (a term first coined by his compadre John Perry Barlow). Sheriff Ludlow reckons there's a whole lot of bad stuff going on out there in Cyberville - and a whole lot of people are going to get shot up when the Hacker gang come riding into town. One thing's sure though - the Hacker brothers will end up in county jail and that mean old Clipper chip will be in your new-fangled fax machine.

High Noon on the Electronic Frontier takes a broad sweep across issues like property rights, computer intrusion, privacy, freedom of speech, the cyber-community and the nature of identity in the information age.

The book consists of contributions from luminaries such as John Perry Barlow (little known as a retired cattle rancher - better known as lyricist for the Grateful Dead), David Chaum (Digicash), Mitchell Kapor (founder of Lotus), Steven Levy (author of Hackers), Richard Stallman (inventor of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation), Philip Zimmerman (author of the PGP encryption program), Bruce Sterling (author of The Hacker Crackdown), Dorothy E. Denning (computer science professor, Georgetown University) and Howard Rheingold (author of Virtual Communities and other cybertomes). There are, interestingly, also contributions from humdog (poet) and The Mentor (former member of the Legion of Doom). This big book is edited by Ludlow, who attempts in his section commentaries to draw together some of the issues raised by the various chapters - some of which date back as far as 1987. Ludlow admits that these are not standard academic treatises; they are, as he notes in his preface, "gonzo readings" and "in your face rants". This because "most of the academic writing on cyberspace is just awful. It either reeks of learned postmodern cant, or is a dense thicket of bad sociology. It puts me to sleep, so why shouldn't it put my students to sleep?" As someone who has enjoyed a pleasant doze over a cyberspace tract or two myself I completely agree, and this miscellany is compelling - and, more important, should be useful for those colleagues who are trying to get their students to actually think about some of the issues raised by new technologies instead of dozing along with the rest of the class in courses on cyberspace.

Ludlow is also upfront - well possibly - about his reason for doing this as a paper book rather than a Web page full of hyperlinks. He tells us that books are not just conveyors of information, but are "vehicles that provide information in a particular format - a format that has a number of advantages . . . what you are paying for is getting the information in that format, not the information itself". Ahem, maybe. But if it were me I would sooner see my students with a copy of my (garishly coloured) High Noon on the Electronic Frontier in their hands than imagine them click-clicking their way round an already overloaded web server.

Still, this is mere carping, and for anyone who wants to point their students in the direction of an alternative sourcebook on some of the most salient issues in digital culture for the millennium - predictions of both utopia and dystopia - they could do a whole lot worse than recommending Ludlow's collection.

Peter Thomas is professor of information management and director of the Centre for Personal Information Management at the University of the West of England.