Laura J. Gurak's Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness attempts to give an overview of the social trends and problems with the internet as we know it today. It looks the problems of speed, reach, anonymitty, interactivity, anger, and censorship, and how the internet is re-writing parts of society.

The attempt of the book is noble, trying to force people to think about the Internet around them and how they interact with it, in an attempt to improve the experience of the Internet. Much of it is not new for experienced internet users, but it does promote a lot of thought.

While the book considers many aspects of personality and the online existence, I will only consider a few that particularly interest me.

Angry Networks

One section of the book that I found particularly interesting was about flaming, hate speech, censorship, and the alike online. Knowning about censorship at a personal level this chapter seemed plenty relevant. Moreover, it looks at flaming and the psychologically behind it, and how to avoid being a flamer. Sometimes it just takes restraint, holding back your true opinion, backing away from the computer for a few minutes.

Another issue it took up, relating to anger, was hate group sites. It briefly mentioned filtering, such as the Anti-Defamination League's HateFilter. It noted that filtering can easily get carried away, to the point where you are just filtering to protect your eyes from messages that you do not approve of, leading you to get only one side of the story.

The reasons for anger online, according to the book, are pretty simple. It's fast and it's easy for one individual to quickly and carelessly post his thoughts online, with minimal restraint. As such, the internet provides a potentially explosive medium. One thing the book did not mention is while some of the internet might be 'angry', it is little more then just electrons that can be switched off at the push of a button.

Land of Pretend

One neat feature of the Internet is it is so annonymous that a person can define himself through the network anyway that he wants to be defined. A man can pretend to be a women online, or pick up some other caracteristic that has no grounding in reality. You can pretend to be a farmer or a rich urbanite online, and only you will know.

That is mostly in theory though. You can't really change who you are, and your words always show your personality through in someway or another. Men are just naturally more aggressive online then women, so pretending to be a women is not as easy it might seem.

Internet Withdrawl

Without a question, it seems that the Internet tends to make people become more withdrawn from society. Their digital identity tends to take over, and the way they think is defined through internet experience. Cyberliteracy takes a brief look at this phenomon and tries to judge societal effects.

The book concludes that while such withdrawl might effect a portion of the population, it is unlikely to grow to the point of being pathological for most people. Too much of our world is distant from the internet, and does not require constantly being online to interact and exist. In the end, it is unlikely that the individual will be dominated by the Internet, at least if he chooses not to be dominated by the 'net.

Conclusions

This is an interesting book, generalized to look at the various phenomons on the internet. It would have been more interesting had the authors had a deeper social-scientific and legal background, and given deeper insight, but on the whole it is a good book. Would I go out and by it? Maybe for a reasonable price.