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Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, by Virginia Eubanks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 266pp. $27.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780262014984.
New media is typically received by people with emotions, which run the gamut from joy to hostility. The rise of cinema we tend to see in hindsight as a glorious age, but did you know that the cinema was censured by many serious prominent citizens, politicians, and educators, including sociology's own Herbert Blumer who believed film was dangerous to the moral education of youth? In our time, it is information technology (IT) that has been an object of loathing as much as unbridled application and consumption in the various sectors of society. Inevitably, celebrations of the power of the technology have been accompanied by fears that IT is a sign of a runaway world of communicative distortion and control. Reading Virginia Eubanks' book, Digital Dead End, can have the very significant and important effect of making one realize how vulnerable, like everyone else, we in the scholarly community have been to the distractions of such mood swings.
Eubanks' book comes from a sociological standpoint that steers clear of the epiphenomena of technophobia and technophilia. Nor does she rely on the mindless assumption, so often taken for granted by adopters and detractors alike, that ''technologies'' are products of experts and administrators of industries and governments that are gradually, inevitably in the process of being adopted by a public. In fact to the contrary, one stated raison d'etre of her work is to unravel the ''magical thinking'' that promotes uncritical belief in technological upotias and dystopias. In this book about social justice there is no Grantian technological will-to-power that needs to be loudly lamented or shouted down. There are only people unwilling to examine the reproduction of inequalities in our new socio-technical formations, unwilling mostly because the prevailing ideology tells us that technologies grant us pathways to individual and collective success or failure.
The subtitle of Eubanks' book, Fighting...