Book Review
The future does not compute
by Cindy Petterson
September 26, 2001

Talbott, S. L. (1995). The future does not compute: Transcending the machines in our midst.
California: O’Reilly & Associates.

Stephen Talbott’s book is about his fear that computers and the Internet are slowly eroding society. He feels that the information highway will not form communities, but instead, drive us further apart. (p. xiv). And he believes that the Internet, like television, creates an abstract and disconnected world for kids (p. 138). With so many fears about the role of computer technology on society, Talbott decided to write a book. Oddly, his publisher is his employer–O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of best-selling user guides for the Internet. President of O’Reilly & Associates, Tim O’Reilly justified, "when a leading publisher of computer and Internet books also publishes a book questioning the role of computers in our society, it just might make people think" (p. xiv).

Talbott offers no solutions in the book. He merely proposes to make the reader contemplate the repercussions of computer technology. He’s pessimistic about the individual who mindlessly uses the computer and asks that users "Enliven the word!" (p. 19). He does believe however that there is some hope for positive exchanges between individuals. He said, "Wherever there is a word, there is a little frozen piece of the interior or a human being….the computer’s inert manipulation of the word drives us to seek, by contrast, how we can speak out of our full humanity" (p. 19).

Talbott hopes that readers will develop a consciousness about technology and computers. This book then, is a collection of thought provoking discussions ranging from: humans allowing machines to command society, the destruction of community, detriments to computers on the education of children, the detached world and the problem with a linear perspective. Talbott also seeks to introduce Owen Barfield’s work which began as early as the 1930’s and sheds light on the issue of the human relation to machine (computer). The following are some highlights of the book:

• Computers are well equipped to help in our understanding of the past but they are misused if we use them as mechanisms to support the future (p. 37).
• Talbott quotes Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet’s designers, who claims that, "it will become critical for everyone to be connected. Anyone who doesn’t will essentially be isolated from the world community" Talbott calls this the "scattering of the self beyond recall (p. 11).
• Talbott quotes a Net contributor who believes that the primary source of data for researchers are ejournals rather than print journals, because immediacy of information is paramount. Talbott calls this arrogant nonsense (p. 11).
• Talbott believes that tools should be an extension of us rather than humans becoming an extension of the machine. He refers to the phrase, "To someone who has only a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail" (p. 30).
• On Owen Barfield--Our thinking is in our heads but also out there participating in the world. Barfield said, "Participation is the extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena" (p. 392). "Figuration is a largely subconscious, imaginative activity through which we participate in producing (‘figuring’) the phenomena of the familiar world. A simple analogy…is found in the way a rainbow is produced by the cooperation of sun, raindrops, and observer" (p. 393).