Monday, October 12, 1998

Just got finished reading (most of) Steven Holtzman’s Digital Mosaics, a book about the aesthetics of cyberspace. The main gist of the book is about what, really, cyberspace is, and what it can do. Fortunately it doesn’t go on about incredible technological changes and so forth (like another book I definitely didn’t buy that predicted “Someday mice and keyboards will be replaced with voice-recognition technology!” Wow! Who’da thunk?! Ground-breaking!); instead, it focuses on the human and artistic aspects of the net. How will cyberspace change the way we think? I don’t necessarily agree with every point he makes (in fact, I disagree with a fair amount of the book), but at the very least it makes you think about the underlying structure of cyberspace, or the structure we use within it, and what forms that structure is likely to take in the future.

I got the book off a bargain bin at an outside sale last night, along with two of Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld novels and a “lost novel” by Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century (one of those pesky books that predicted the future with alarming accuracy, and Verne’s editor flatly refused for being too fantastic). The entire bill came to $20.86 for four hardbacks, two of them first editions (a tad less than what I would have paid for Verne’s novel regularly). I tell ya, bargain-bin sales and used book stores are worth the trouble ten times over.