High Technology and Human Freedom by Lewis H.

Lapham
Review by: Trudi Bellardo
The Library Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 122-123
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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122 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

and end of the book there are multiple articlesper topic; the middle ten articles
cover more discrete subjects.
Most articleseither review developments in serialswork for 1975-85 or have
an established context for inclusion in a decennary collection. There is an
enjoyable mixture of new ideas, surveys, and "how we did it" approachesand
personal and impersonal points of view. The few articlesthat do not seem to fit
in either lack the historicalperspective or treat less significant,narrowerissues
than is appropriate here.
The book begins with an overview of the form versus function debate on
serials organization. There are two summary articles (with some overlap) sur-
rounding one by Michael Gorman that presents the issue again and raises new
points for consideration. Certainlythe major developments of the decade took
place in the areas of automation and cataloging,and these are well summarized
in the next eight articles. "SerialsAutomation:An Annotated Bibliographyand
Review, 1976-1984," byJanis FleischmannandJean Houghton, is excellent and
provides some of the best reading of the book. Together with Lenore Maru-
yama's"WhatHas Technology Done for Us Lately?"it offers useful background
on networks, vendors, serials control systems, and so forth. The section on
catalogingincludes an overview article ("ADecade of SerialsCataloging"byJim
Cole and Olivia Madison)and three other articlesthat deal with such mattersas
the catalogingcodes, the changing role of the serialscataloger,and problemsin
applying AACR2. Following Marjorie Bloss's review of union listing, which
relates to automation and cataloging, the articles focus on a variety of other
topics. These include serialsindexing,journal selection and fund control, claim-
ing, storage,and microformsuse. Of particularnote are the four articlesdescrib-
ing internationaltrends; "Accessibilityof Serials,"by Ruth McBride;and "1975-
1985: FormulativeYears for the SubscriptionAgency,"by RebeccaLenziniand
Judith Horn. The final pieces round out the coverageof the book with reviewsof
serial publishing trends and the future of scholarlycommunication.
Noticeably absent from this collection is any article dealing specificallywith
serial binding, which is a major libraryexpense and has in recent years been
discussed as a preservationissue without much regard for processingcomplex-
ities. More analyses of local binding practices, such as those described by
McBride and by Stella Pilling and David Wood ("Serialsat the British Library
Lending Division")would be useful. As Fleischmannand Houghton discovered
in their search for information on automated binding functions, this gap is
evident in the literature as a whole for the period since 1976.
In conclusion, this book presents a good overviewof significantserialsdevel-
opments over the past decade.
Jean Shady, Regenstein Library, Universityof Chicago

High Technologyand Human Freedom. Edited by LEWiS H. LAPHAM. Smithsonian

InternationalSymposiaSeries. Washington,D.C.: SmithsonianInstitutionPress,
1985. Pp. 170. $19.95 (cloth);$9.95 (paper). ISBN 0-87474-598-5;0-87474-598-
3 (paper).
Reading this book straight through would be like sitting through twenty con-
secutive after-dinner speeches while slowly spooning up one's ice cream parfait.
Each speech is quite well written, pithy, and to the point of the theme of the
book, but the cumulativeeffect (parfait included) is numbing and indigestible.

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 REVIEWS 123

The point of the book is to examine, from various political, sociological,

economic, and other viewpoints, the impact of high technology (meaning any-
thing produced since the printing press) on the human condition. High technol-
ogy is defined very broadly here and referred to sometimes as just "the ma-
chine." Such a wide-sweeping topic could only be, and is, treated quite
superficiallyin 170 pages. A more serious indictment of the book, however, is
that the twenty separate essays, by twenty different authors, are arranged only
by loose grouping into four general categories:"The Road after 1984,""Dilem-
mas,""ForeignPerspectives,"and "Media."Other than these groupings, there is
no continuity, connection, or progression from one piece to the next. Both the
content and the style of each essay is idiosyncraticto the contributor.Overall,the
themes of the book are too sprawling to be summarized succinctly.In one of
the essays, that on French perspectivesof high technology and human freedom,
a remark attributed to Jean-Claude Beaune about French thinking about tech-
nology, that it is a "disorganizedwhole of disparate reflections"(p. 121), might
well be said also of this book.
But there are some good things to sayabout the book. The title fits. Eachessay,
in one way or another, speaks to the general theme, some much more explicitly
than others. It has an impressivecast of contributorsthat includes eight college
professors from various disciplines, two college presidents, two magazine
editors, and a director of the Department for Professional Employees of the
AFL-CIO,an executive associateof the Social Science ResearchCouncil in New
York, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New YorkTimes,a vice-
president of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, an author, and one person
identified only as "a friend of Orwell's"who during the Second World War
"servedfor a time as PsychologicalWarfareOfficer with the U.S. Fifth Army in
Italy"(p. 170). Even though only one of the contributorswas previouslyknown
to me (Henry Steele Commager), all of their credentials sound substantialand
credible.
The book can also be commended for the breadth of its interdisciplinary
perspective. It is to the credit probably of the editor or the organizer of the
original symposiumon which this collection is based that the essaystake a broad
historial approach to the human issues of high technology. The opinions and
insights will not, therefore, become dated as soon as online computer systems
take over completely from punched cards or are in turn replaced by CD-ROM.
My negative feelings about the book are mostly petty annoyances rather than
serious challenges to the ideas discussed. I found it irritating,for example, that
of the twenty essays, fourteen began with a quotation from an admired man of
letters.This essayist'sdevice seemed particularlyoverworkednear the end of the
book, where the essays are no longer than two to four pages long and the
arguments themselves especially superficial and underdeveloped.
Some of the essaysare absorbing,provocative,creative,and even entertaining;
others are cliche ridden and therefore pompous and boring. Manyof them are
fairly insubstantialand lack original perspectives.The book is not adorned with
such scholarly accoutrements as footnotes, references, or an index.
I certainly do not want to condemn this book; I think it is not without some
merit. When I try to think of the appropriate audience, however, I can only
come up with graduate students for whom the little essays could be thought-
provoking springboards for seminar discussions.
Trudi Bellardo, College of Libraryand Information Science, University of Kentucky

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