What's the Matter with the Internet? (review)

What's the Matter with the Internet? By Mark Poster. Electronic Mediations Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; pp. ix + 214. $49.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.

Mark Poster's ambiguously titled What's the Matter with the Internet? offers readers an attempt to explain the place the Internet has in our culture and as a culture. Amidst the ever-pressing presence capitalism occupies on the Net, and the confused role government plays in the Internet's day-to-day life, Poster relies upon theorists (Heidegger, Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida) to iterate the Net's potential as cultural space. The explanations and descriptions these venerable thinkers offer serve Poster well in his attempt to make the Internet an intellectual pursuit worthy of academic investigation. What's the Matter with the Internet?, a relatively close-knit collection of essays, works best when Poster leaves behind the theorists he so admires and speaks to the reader in a practical voice to which they can all relate.

What Poster does in What's the Matter with the Internet? recalls the mystique of Gorgias from classical rhetoric: he interrogates a source that has been proclaimed as omniscient to reveal that it is neither omniscient nor a vacuum of knowledge. Poster's investigation of the Internet uncovers a problematic space where neither the utopian cheerleaders of high-tech nor the doom-saying skeptics carry the day. Poster's Internet stands as a source of seemingly unending dialectic inquiry.

Poster isn't so much breaking new ground with What's the Matter with the Internet? as he is expounding on the themes explored in his earlier works. That said, What's the Matter with the Internet? would be well served with an introduction. The title itself calls out for explanation: Is the author going to offer insight to "fix" the Internet? Or, will the author explain what makes up the Web? As it turns out, Poster's book is much more of the latter, but it also doesn't completely ignore the former interpretation. A preface could tie together the essays more tightly, and give the reader a better sense of where the author will take us, and thus a chance for the reader to decide whether to take the ride.

Those readers who do take Poster's offer should not come away from the book disappointed; What's the Matter with the Internet? remains a thorough examination into the cultural challenge the Internet presents. However, readers should question the author's reasons for forwarding this text as a book. In the chapter entitled "Authors Analogue and Digital," Poster, after establishing a binary relationship between authors who write for print and the new author who composes digital texts, derides the image of the modern author: "A readerly imaginary evolved that paid homage to this wonderful author who was always there in his or her words, ready to repeat him- or herself, always open to be admired or criticized. The world of analogue authors was leisurely, comforting, reassuring" (93). This kind of language calls forth a reaction that says "analogue bad, digital good." If this is indeed the message that Poster professes, why write a book at all? Why not abandon the realm of the "analogue" author and become cyborg? The answer, of course, roots itself in the economics of the academy and the world in which Poster composes: Academic writing pays little "tangible" capital, but does reward the author with "intangible" pay in the form of tenure and promotion; electronic publishing is yet to be recognized as an acceptable form of currency by the academy. So Poster, like the rest of us, remains trapped between the modern analogue author and the Net-ready digital author. But it is in the analogue author that Poster finds much of his inspiration and support no matter how it solidifies or betrays his argument.

"Theorizing the Virtual: Baudrillard and Derrida" is Poster's nod to theory. Here he relies on the...