IT Week receives many books these days, most of which are full of praise for technological advances of one kind or another. This one is different, however, and urges internet users to consider the downside of our connected world.

The fact that the author, Lee Siegel, is a cultural commentator and art critic, rather than an authority on IT, speaks volumes about how the role of technology in society is changing. One of his aims is to make sense of our relationship with the internet. “Are we sacrificing our identity?” Siegel asks, questioning whether we use the internet, or the internet uses us.

Early in the book, the author notes some parallels between the growth in the internet and the boom in car ownership in 1960s America. “The internet has its destructive side just as the automobile does, and both technologies entered the world from behind a curtain of triumphalism hiding their dangers from critical view,” he writes. “As with the car, a rhetoric of freedom, democracy, choice, and access has covered up the greed and blind self-interest that lie behind what much of the internet has developed into today.”

Siegel ponders whether we can actually get by without the internet. Although he acknowledges that there are many ways in which it can make our lives easier, such as when house hunting, he asserts that few activities are completely reliant on the internet. “No one can deny the internet’s capacity to make life easier. But let’s be honest, I would have found an apartment,” he writes.

Siegel believes society must try to rein in the internet before it gets out of hand. Built to support commerce and capital, he argues, the internet is now an unruly beast that controls our lives, dominating our attention and time. In short, Siegel thinks the internet is becoming too pervasive, too quickly.

Many who have studied the internet and its impact in the past have a far more positive outlook, but these people do not impress Siegel. For example, he dismisses the findings of the Pew Internet Group by asserting that eight out of the 12 people who write its reports have “a financial or professional stake in the internet”.

Siegel also discusses Bill Gates’ admission that while technology has created problems, it is technology that we must turn to for a solution. To which someone with Siegel’s frame of mind would no doubt retort: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
Author: Lee Siegel
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
ISBN: 978-1846686979