The hyperlinked society : questioning connections in the digital age /

These essays written by 18 authors present legitimately divergent viewpoints that offer more questions than conclusions. They look at social transformations that should be anticipated as people increasingly acquire their information and interact with each other through the Internet. Web sites like Google use hyperlinks to rank the relevance of other sources as people search for desired knowledge. The sites a user sees first when doing a Web search are the ones s/he will probably turn to. Therefore, appearing regularly on Google or Yahoo! offers financial and perhaps political or ideological advantages. This makes the control of hyperlinks socially crucial. Are they to be highly centralized and organized by the state or large corporations, or will small individual users determine access? Will this be decided by the market or by forces that could undermine the market? The authors suggest that as the World Wide Web becomes truly worldwide, people will reach a juncture leading to either greater democracy or greater authoritarianism. Understandably, the authors offer substantially different prognoses, which help readers be more informed as they come to their conclusions. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Y. R. Magrass University of Massachusetts Dartmouth