I recently tried to read Digital Shock by Hervé Fischer and actually managed to read and to finish Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger. They were both problematic for me, in similar ways. Both of them, in the midst of talking about technology, made philosophical claims for which I would like better citation than just the assertions of the authors. Unfortunately, both books were this odd combination of academic and popular, which made me think of them as poorly sourced original research rather than weird popularizations of material.
The author of Digital Shock, Hervé Fischer, who seems like he may actually be a big deal guy from googling him, just came across as pompous with his “30 Paradoxical Rules of the Digital” which were either not paradoxical or not always true, depending on which rule he was talking about at any given time. I gave up halfway through the book and skipped to the final chapter where he just reiterated each rule. The book was translated from the original french, presumably not by the author, and I think it may have suffered a bit in the translation. Either that, or the author really is constantly praising himself for being so farsighted in the original. Much like Born Digital, many of the insights felt like they were aimed at people who are not digital natives.
Digital stuff makes intuitive sense to me (and many others), more sense than many analog things, which means that if you are going to proclaim a new philosophy of all things digital, you shouldn’t spend so much verbage calling digital things bizarre and strange and ununderstandable except by your own tortured metaphor. Instead, just lay out what you want to say, and then say it. A whole generation of scholars and parents are worrying about the digital revolution and the fate of their children who may be drowning in data, just like the parents and scholars are. The crucial insight is that the children cannot drown: the kids are fish, and therefore the kids are alright.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger has such a great title that I really wanted to like it. Every massively successful and robust system seems to basically made up of small pieces which are loosely joined, so the title instantly made me want to read more. The phrase is a pithy summary of how Unix, the Internet, and the Web all work. It’s even a good design principle for object oriented programming! The book was full of pithy phrases, but the individual quotations were better than the book as whole. Frustratingly, SPLJ used the citation pattern where, at the end of the book, he gave a list of books from which they drew material for each chapter. This made it basically impossible to check any claims or to verify anything stated. Which is extra frustrating because halfway through the book he veers from discussing the web and why it is great to discussing Descartes and why Descartes and dualism suck. He basically lost me at that point. I’m willing to accept that a slim volume by someone I have never heard of will contain interesting new insights about how the web, over time, is changing the world in various interesting ways, but I find it harder to believe that the same book would also serve as an effective refutation of dualism, of the idea of information independent of an observer, and of utilitarianism.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined is a good book in many parts. But you should skip the chapter titled “Knowledge”, and treat the latter half of the chapter titled “Matter” as pretty dicey. It’s a fundamentally hopeful book (the past chapter is “Hope”) and it says that the web is bringing people together and allowing people to talk in more authentic voices. I liked those parts. The philosophy parts were more problematic. Even more problematic – like a fork in my mathematical eye – was his glibness with a few well-defined mathematical terms. He talked about how Metcalfe’s Law implies that the usefulness of a network grows with the square of the number of users, which means that an extra user can make a network much more useful. He then referred to the “exponential growth of utility” in the next sentence! Arrgh! Exponential is 
After all that, however, I basically did like the book. It had too many good sentences for me not to like it. The parts were great, but the whole didn’t work. Here is a selection of snippets:
Perhaps the Web isn’t shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is getting more interesting.
The world is richer with meaning than we can imagine.
the familiar hiss and pop of modems falling in love
For these and more, I ended up forgiving the book its flaws and liking it despite myself. I don’t know if I would recommend it, but I do feel like I did not waste my time in reading it. Looking at computer science from the outside looking in is just strange.
