Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Law and the Environment: A Multidisciplinary Reader. Edited by Robert V Percival and Dorothy C. Alevizatos, Temple University Press, 1997. Reviewed by Lynn A. Robbins

1999; University of Arizona; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2458/v6i1.21502

1073-0451

Stanislav Shmelev,

Property Rights and Legal Doctrine

apparent a coherence of perspective, as well as the good writing, that makes its breadth accessible to students.As social informatics, however, the book falls short.Partly this is a consequence of its author's inattention to Leo Marx, Wolpert, and even Amsden and Clark's dissents from a too easy embrace of the rhetorics of Computer Revolution, whether by celebrants like Mitchell or semicritics like Castells.Schön and Sanyal are correct in their conclusion that the book, and the seminar it reflects, never quite succeeds in creating the dialogue between academics and activists it hoped for.Almost twenty years ago in Sheffield, England, a similarly critical academic group in Sheffield, England, Computers for People, went out to warn the working class about the bleakness of a computered future.They encountered polite attention from workers losing their jobs to the Tory's run-down of the steel industry, but real enthusiasm for offhanded ideas to help their kids get cheap, assemble-it-yourself computer to run games.Computers for People academics rethought what they were about, coming to a fuller appreciation of the situation of the activist.In a social formation dominated by techno-talk, talk that colonizes the very dreams of young people who see very little positive in futures like those of their parents, activists like Mel King of course have to come to terms with computing.In such a situation, one form or another of short-term accommodation to the terms of contemporary discourse is likely.Such necessary rhetorical accommodation does not eliminate the need for, nor should it displace, strategies for "attacking their problems within the larger historical, cultural, and socioeconomic matrix that generates them."Only then, as Leo Marx argues, are activists "likely to devise effective ways to use the new technologies."Schön and his colleagues at MIT remain fixated on the initial situation out of which the seminar and book grew.They confuse acknowledging a need to appropriate computing as a cognitive terrain with its acceptance as a structure.A truly valuable analysis of AIT and people without security in contemporary social formations will be built on a more equal dialogue than that presented in this volume.Such a dialogue will acknowledge not just what activists can learn from computer gurus, but also what the structuralist analysts of computing have to learn from those engaged in contemporary battles over political economy or political ecology.