Internet and Everyone

In this extraordinary book, a series of 'letters written at the beginning of an era in which the book has lost the significance it had and in which electronic correspondence, in which anyone may join, becomes the medium of the moment', John Chris Jones explores the potential of the internet as the instigator of a new kind of life. The book is in fact a record of an electronic text, an attempt to find a new form of writing which acknowledges the significance of the connectedness and immediacy of computer networks. In the author's words, it is 'a record of trying to think some of the unthinkables that our technologies have brought before us in this pause before the post-industrial breakfast...'. Based on an analysis of automation (the replacement of human skills by machines, as industrialization was the replacement of human effort), the possibilities opened up by the transmission of information by electricity, and a refusal to accept that the 'virtual' world is in any sense less real than the world excluding computers, Jones sees the internet as making possible an awakening from the 'frozen dreaming' of industrial life.