Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

This book had the typical problems of old people writing about the new technology. They just... don't get it. They want it to be wildly more revolutionary than it is, and yet have no real concept of how real people use these modern tools, and what *really is* revolutionary about that. For example, Rotman states that since the advent of the internet, humans are going to stop using alphabetic writing. Seriously? Have you even looked at the internet, like, at all? Writing (alphabetically) is pretty much all people do anymore. If anything, our lives are more structured by written language than ever before. Virtual reality suits, facial recognition technology -- these things have only a tiny influence on us proportional to facebook and show more fanfic and forums and a million other tools for sending and receiving written words.

To be fair, he does make some cool and interesting points, but I lack confidence in his familiarity with the world he is describing. show less