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WELCOME TO CYBERSCHOOL
David Trend
Lanham, MD: Rowman 6 Littlefield Publishers, 2001
With a greeting that usually announces an arrival, David Trend bids us a hearty Welcome to Cybersehool. But the intonation of anything adorned with this omnipresent prefix will obviously not let us dwell for long. Like any technological advance that has announced the future, from the steam engine to the silicon chip, there is a premonition of change and passing in every greeting, an immediacy of goodbye. Trend's book sets out to question the speed of obsolescence within the current climate of information exchange and the unequivocally optimistic promises it extends. Much like the steam engine fired up the industrial revolution and enabled the widespread trade of goods and information, the Internet and computer culture seen today provide accelerated outlets for similar exchanges. The online communities formed in the process have altered the social framework, and Trend argues that they are constituted by an increasingly uniform commonality. (para)