Product Description
In Silicon Snake Oil, Clifford Stoll, the best-selling author of The Cuckoo's Egg and one of the pioneers of the Internet, turns his attention to the much-heralded information highway, revealing that it is not all it's cracked up to be. Yes, the Internet provides access to plenty of services, but useful information is virtually impossible to find and difficult to access. Is being on-line truly useful? "Few aspects of daily life require computers...They're irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing, speaking, and gossiping. You don't need a computer to...recite a poem or say a prayer." Computers can't, Stoll claims, provide a richer or better life.

A cautionary tale about today's media darling, Silicon Snake Oil has sparked intense debate across the country about the merits--and foibles--of what's been touted as the entranceway to our future.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 73 reviews)

Such a joke it even shows up on Fark

This book and author are such a joke it even showed up on Fark today! HILARIOUS!!! ex. He talks about how his local mall does more business in an afternoon than the ENTIRE INTERNET does in a MONTH!!!! I didn't read the book (only an excerpt he wrote) but this gem is like something from a time capsule predicting the future, but hilariously he predicts the exact OPPOSITE of everything that has come to be from 1995 to 2008! Yep, the Internet sure was just a big fad!

Hey Old Man River, watch your hip and good luck getting those dang kids off your lawn!
March 24, 2008

Sad, sad, sad

Paranoia over the internet and sadly his foresight was very limited. It's surprising that any educated person would predict the things he did.
March 23, 2008

Cliff was right when he wrote it, and he's righter now.

Okay, so I'm being grammatically incorrect.

Every day, somewhere, sand boxes and finger paints are being replaced in kindergartens and day care centers by flat panel displays and mice -- at taxpayer expense.

10 years later I'm still chewing over Cliff's consideration of the moral differences habituated in children by computer games, on the one hand, and kick-the-can on the other. The book is worth reading for this alone.

hiho

December 06, 2007

dated, still thought-provoking, but ultimately unsatisfying

I feel a little bit guilty in writing a review for a book about computing that is now several years old. As other reviewers have noted, there's a lot about this book that is horrendously dated: e-commerce is well-established, network access speeds have long since shattered 9600 baud, Usenet is (for all intents and purposes) dead.

But move beyond that for a minute. Ignore anything he says about download speeds (although you should consider that, according to the Pew Internet Project, only 42% of Americans have high-speed Internet access at home, so broadband isn't as ubiquituous as some would like us to believe). Smile when he questions the concept of e-commerce. Every time he references Usenet or newsgroups, mentally substitute blogs and web forums; do the same substition with MUDs and World of Warcraft.

Even now, 12 years after the fact, the questions that he raises are still important and relevant. While I can find fantastic recipes for bread online, it doesn't actually tell me anything about that instant when you know you've kneaded the bread long enough. Getting driving directions online is great, until you realise that construction or an accident is blocking your intended route and you can't figure out how to get around it because you don't have an actual paper map. Kids learning how to use computers is great, but when they can't do basic arithmetic or write a five-paragraph essay, how can we justify spending millions every year on computers in the classroom?

For all that I think that the questions that he raised need meaningful answers, I found the book unsatisfying. Stoll is obviously a computer geek himself, and was a heavy computer and Internet user at the time that he wrote the book, so it is frustrating that he offers up so much criticism without tempering it with some statements about what he does find useful online. The book reads like a conversation, which is somewhat annoying because it wanders all over the place and gets a bit repetitive. It could have been tightened up into a highly-compelling work.
April 16, 2007

dated and ridiculous

Granted, this book is 12 years old, so it's going to be outdated. But many of Stoll's predictions and insights about the internet simply never came to pass. For instance, he claims that "few aspects of daily life require computers... they're irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing, speaking, and gossiping." Not true. I've gotten countless wonderful recipes online, I wouldn't think of planning a trip without consulting an online map site, and I've learned more about different hiking trails via conservation websites than I would have ever come across in books or magazines. I understand that computers are not an absolute necessity. But I don't know what I would do without quick, easy, and inexpensive access to the information available on the internet these days. And that's saying nothing of e-commerce, which has revolutionized the trade of goods in this country over the last decade or so. Sorry, Cliff, but you were way off on this one.
September 25, 2006

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