The library journal Choice selected this book as one of its six “Outstanding Academic Books” for 1996 in the field of Information and Computer Science. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments.

Part 1: Man, Computers, and Community

1. Can Human Ideals Survive the Internet?

2. The Machine in the Ghost

3. The Future Does Not Compute

4. Settlers in Cyberspace

5. On Being Responsible for Earth

6. Networks and Communities

7. At the Fringe of Freedom

8. Things That Run by Themselves

9. Do We Really Want a Global Village?

10. Thoughts on a Group Support System

11. In Summary

Part 2: Computers in Education

12. Net-based Learning Communities

13. Impressing the Science out of Children

14. Children of the Machine

Part 3. The Electronic World

15. Dancing with My Computer

16. The Tyranny of the Detached Word

17. The Great Information Hunt

18. And the Word Became Mechanical

19. Listening for the Silence

Part 4. Owen Barfield, Computers, and the Evolution of Consciousness

20. Awaking from the Primordial Dream

21. Mona Lisa's Smile

22. Seeing in Perspective

23. Can We Transcend Computation?

24. Electronic Mysticism

25. What This Book Was About

Appendices

A. Owen Barfield: The Evolution of Consciousness

B. From Virtual to Real

C. Education Without Computers

REVIEWS

“Talbott’s important, seminal work should be read by everyone working with computers....His penetrating discussions of works by H. Rheingold, G. Gilder, and S. Papert are models of dispassionate analysis. This short review cannot do justice to the scope and depth of this first critical study of computers since J. Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason.” 

— J. Mayer, Choice, May, 1996 

 “There are many words — complex, eccentric, thoughtful, stimulating, perplexing, penetrating — suitable to describe this challenging book, suitable but inadequate. It is a deep exegesis (at times very deep) of the problem of man’s relationship to computer-based technology and its manifestations — the Internet, digital images, virtual reality and as a medium of entertainment and communication. The author sums up his brief early on: ‘We and our mechanical offspring are bound together in an increasingly tight weave. To substantially modify the larger pattern — rather than simply be carried along by it — requires profound analysis of things not immediately evident, and a difficult effort to change things not easily changed.’” 

— Stephen Horvath, Logos — The Journal of the World Book Community, vol. 11, issue 2, 2000 

“Talbott tears apart all the standard conceptions and misconceptions and gets down to basics — the meaning of things; the differences between data, information, and wisdom; how people communicate and interact — and builds his discussion logically and artfully.
While I disagree with some of his conclusions, Talbott challenged many of my assumptions and long-held feelings about the roles of the Internet and computers in my life. He does this better than anyone has in a long time.” 

— Miles O'Neal, Unix Review's “Best Books of 1995,” January, 1996