Cons: Pretentious, logically unsound, and flat-out annoying at times.
The Bottom Line: Could've been a classic. Instead, little more than a confused jumble of factoids and anecdotes, a far cry from “classic” material and more like the hypertext the author disdains.
vicwang's Full Review: Clifford Stoll - Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thought...
For a book hailed as “a manifesto” by the Washington Post and that promotes itself as “the first book to question the inflated claims of the Internet,” Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll certainly falls short of expectations. Whether because of Stoll’s consistently loop-holed arguments, his amazing use of redundancy, or the book’s abundance of surprisingly worthless anecdotes, SSO never manages to attain any measure of coherency, instead leading the reader to wonder just how much of this “manifesto” is founded in reality and how much Stoll just puts on to believe. Too bad its basic premise is right-on, and many of Stoll’s points border on the fascinating; with superior execution SSO could have been a classic.
Instead, right from the onset SSO establishes itself as a book with as much filler as truly substantial material, as many powerfully convincing arguments as worthless ones, and about as much subtlety as, well, a manifesto. The shockingly ambiguous three-page anecdote in the first chapter, recounting the author’s spelunking experience in 1976, says absolutely nothing; likewise for the story of him and his friends ordering food in a Chinese restaurant, or of the one about his friend building a car to drive on railroad tracks. And those are just in the first three chapters. He does himself one better with the "12˝th Chapter”--a full nine pages of pretentious self-praising drivel in which, with incredible irony, he “defends” his writing abilities with perhaps the poorest example of writing I have yet to see in a published work.
Yet when Stoll does manage to stick to the point, he falters as well, confusingly praising the virtues of technology one moment then lambasting its flaws the next, often seeming to change his viewpoint to fit his needs. In citing the advantages of “snail mail” over e-mail, he notes that virtually everyone has access to the postal system, but only a relatively elite few have access to e-mail. True. Yet later, in citing the advantages of the fax-machine to e-mail, he writes, “the Internet is painfully slow… it’s almost always faster to fax a single-page letter than to send Internet e-mail,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that an even more elite few have access to fax-machines! In another case that should never have made it past the editors, he grossly contradicts himself when he writes “…the fast response of computers causes us to repeatedly refine (an e-mail document that) once might have been good enough. Since it’s so easy to revise documents, well, we go ahead and revise ‘em.” How strange that he later spends pages of text arguing the complete opposite--that email encourages us to send fire them off prematurely, without bothering to proofread at all.
But perhaps his most glaring logical fault is his recurrent use of circular reasoning, supporting his arguments with points that rely on him being correct in the first place. In one case, he writes, “During that week you spend online, you could have planted a tomato garden, volunteered at a hospital, spoken with your child’s teacher… Every hour that you’re behind the keyboard is sixty minutes that you’re not doing something else,” implying that time online is inherently inferior to “real” time because, well, it just is. Later he draws the analogy to automatic bread-makers, noting that the machines may make bread more quickly and efficiently, but that “you’ve missed the best parts… kneading the dough, punching down air bubbles…." An interesting point, except that, while to him the tactile experience of making bread by-hand is “the best", to some people it may be a tedious, inefficient, and ultimately worthless process, and that perhaps that wasted time could have been spent on more worthwhile activities-behind the keyboard, for example.
Similarly, he often writes off electronic media simply because they function poorly as replacements to their real-life counterparts. But I must wonder: who but the most radical technocrat would even begin to expect digital books to replace real ones, online supermarkets to replace the local HEB, or CD-ROMs to replace actual human teachers? Stoll spends a significant portion of his book countering these viewpoints that, for the most part, I seriously doubt even exist. Perhaps Stoll should have spent more time considering the usefulness of these tools as complements to their real life counterparts instead of so readily dismissing them. Digital books could be invaluable research tools, allowing the user to search for a specific passage instantly, search for all passages containing a certain character/motif, etc. Online supermarkets could someday function as premium services for people who lack the time to shop in real supermarkets. And using a high-quality French “tutor” on CD-ROM between “real” lessons is a heck of a lot better than nothing at all. It’s no wonder that Stoll fails to see the “multi” in “multimedia when he seems to consider the “online” and “real” worlds as entirely separate entities.
But this is not to say that SSO lacks merit, by any means. In fact, odd as it may sound, I agree with 90% of what Stoll writes in this book. He addresses some issues with tremendous insight (historical effectiveness of computer media, the true definition of “learning”, among others) and some of the anecdotes, even the irrelevant ones, are genuinely interesting. As stated previously, with superior execution (and perhaps editing) SSO could have been a classic, a landmark first step in a new sub-genre of right-minded techie books. As is, it’s little more than a repetitious, confused jumble of factoids and anecdotes, a far cry from “classic” material and more like the hypertext documents Stoll so disdains. Perhaps SSO would have been better had it been on CD-ROM.
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