Against the Machine

by Lee Siegel

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his "drive-by brilliance" and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as "one of the country's most eloquent and acid-tongued critics" comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet. Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It's become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion inlife online doesn't just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven't yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products--such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the "bourgeois bohemian"--have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused