The preface by the editors is a salutory assessment of the big picture:

"The wish to leave body, time and place behind in search of electronic emulation of community does not accidentally intensify at a time when the space and time of everyday life have become so uncertain, unpleasant and dangerous for so many...But the flight into cyberspace is motivated by the same fears and longings as the flight to the suburbs: it is another "white flight"." (ix) Earlier they note:

"Information and information technology are structural supports that business, government and the military cannot dispense with - the flow of information will remain of paramount importance to the expansion and survival of the capitalist world system, as will the intensification and surveillance of labor that the new machines enhance." (viii)

Resisting the Virtual Life contains an ambitious twenty-one contributions arranged into four sections entitled: 'the new information enclosures'; 'rewiring the body'; 'degrading work'; and 'the repainting of modern life'. The contributors are as diverse a lot as one might ask. Luminaries of the field are represented: Herbert Schiller, Les Levidow, Kevin Robins and George Lakoff are some of the better known names. The account by Ellen Ullman (a professional programmer) of the culture of those who live 'close to the machine' is as disturbing as it is amusing. Rebecca Solnit's " Garden of Merging Paths" purports to be a history of Silicon Valley but is much more. It becomes an insightful parable on the technological transformation of US society. Laura Miller's "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier" argues (as many of us have) that beneath the vapid futurism lies a repetition, an entrenchment, of very traditional roles for women.

In "Soldier, Cyborg, Citizen", Kevin Robins and Les Levidow offer a psycho-analytic assessment of the phenomenon of the military- technological panopticon . They scrape away at the gangrenous flesh of our accumulated rationalisations by introducing the notion of "paranoid rationality":

"through a paranoid rationality, expressed in the machine-like self, we combine an omnipotent phantasy of self control with fear and agression directed against the emotional and bodily limitations of mere mortals. Through regression to a phantasy of infantile omnipotence we deny our dependancy on nature, upon our own nature, upon the 'bloody mess' of organic nature. We phantasize about controlling the world, freezing historical forces and if necessary, even destroying them in rage; we thereby contain our anxiety in the name of maintaining rational control" (112)

One could continue discussing each contribution in turn, I'll leave that to the reader. Suffice to say that there are remarkably few contributions which I regretted spending the time on. The authors tend away from vacuous theoretical posturing. There is little in the volume that demands specialist knowledge. Most of it is accessible to reasonably literate undergrads. The quality and general readability of the essays combined with the breadth of issues that the volume addresses would commend it as a required text in any course on technology and society. This is a good book and very reasonably priced.