Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

by William J. Mitchell

Book Overview

How the transformation of wireless technology and the creation of an interconnected world are changing our environment and our lives.

With Me++ the author of City of Bits and e-topia completes an informal trilogy examining the ramifications of information technology in everyday life. William Mitchell describes the transformation of wireless technology in the hundred years since Marconi--the scaling up of networks...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262633132
• ISBN13: 9780262633130
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A nice book to recommand

This book is enlightening for urban studies in the future. Clearly as it suggested the urbanist shall be (able to be) more sensitive to non physical spaces as well as 'conventional' spatial interventions. However it is also quesionable in what way we can catch up with the fast, unpredictable development of internet (along with other h-tech industries which has already gone far beyond our imigination), a review on the developed network is self-evidently far from enough. In reality internet users,at the same moment,urban space users learn cyber-space by clicking, browsing, online-purchasing rather than reading, apparently it is more effective and empirically more understandable. This fact makes theories about cyber-society more or less, inevitbly obsolete and seemingly less neccessary. After all the book is intelligent especially when it explicitly, or implicitly indicates the interaction (possible interations) between urban space and cyber-space.

a humanising trend

To someone bewildered by the continuing pace of technological changes, Mitchell offers calming and exciting insights as to where we might all be going. You might well call him a futurist, along the lines of Alvin Toffler and Herman Kahn. Certainly, he writes gracefully, and does not drown you in technobabble. He describes the rise of a pervasive mobile networking environment around each of us. Encapsulated for the most part in the already ubiquitous cell phone. It is already been noticed by others that cell phone styling is of importance to some users. It bespeaks a fashion sense about themselves that they wish to proclaim to the world. Mitchell suggests that such attitudes will grow, as some manifestations of technology become ever smaller and more closely associated with their users. A humanising, and not a de-humanising trend.