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Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. B. J. Fogg. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
It is rare for a book to define a new discipline or fundamentally change how we think about technology and our jobs. This book does all of this.
-Jakob Nielsen
B. J. Fogg has created an important new discipline, one that is of vital importance to everyone.
-Donald A. Norman
I normally would not begin the review of a hook by quoting from advance reviewer comments that come from the back cover, but in this case I just cannot help myself. For one thing, the comments are made by two highly prominent researchers in the arena of information technologies. But, more interestingly, the comments make a most amazing claim: that B. J. Fogg, through Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, has done nothing short of creating an entire new discipline, a new field of inquiry.
I admit that such claims make up the publisher hype that sells books. But inside the book, even in the opening pages, I found similar claims that are difficult to accept, such as Fogg's claim in the preface:
While completing my master's degree in 1992,1 created a document design curriculum and taught honors students in what I believe was the first undergraduate course ever in information design. In the two years that I taught the course, as my students and I explored how to make documents accessible, usable, and persuasive, it became clear to me that my real interest was in the third aspect: persuasion, (p. xxiv)
In fact, the Document Design Center at Carnegie Mellon and the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C., had been engaged in such efforts since the 1970s. James Hartley and Patricia Wright, among many others, were forging such paths in England during the same time period. Many readers of this journal were teaching document and information design at all levels long before Fogg "created" the discipline. Although Fogg sees captology as a new synthesis of rhetoric, psychology, and technology, captology offers little new to current discussions of rhetoric and technology or...