Skip to main content

Being Virtual – Davey Winder ***

This is one of a small series of books linked to the Dana Centre at the Science Museum in London. I’m a great fan of the Dana Centre – it’s a stylish cafe bar, where most evenings there is an informal and interactive session on once science topic or another. Like the Café Scientifique movement, it’s a great way of getting the science message across in a non-threatening way.
However, there is a problem with the Dana Centre – and it comes through to some extent in this book. When I look at the Centre’s programme, there’s rarely anything I would want to go to. There is very little hard science – although I’ve taken part in couple of excellent hard science events there, their brief is strongly around science and society, which means the topics are often so soft they are positively mushy.
That’s really why this book only scores three stars. It is highly enjoyable to read, but contains very little science, and doesn’t even, I would suggest, go to the heart of the topic it is covering – the online virtual world. Like the Dana Centre itself, there is an element of style over substance in the way the book is constructed. It has glossy pages with colour illustrations – which is great – but the pages are often dominated by really irritating multicoloured pull quotes, which make it harder to read and provide no benefit to the reader.
What we get is a very personal guide to this world by Davey Winder. It tells us a fair amount of history – though it tends to be limited to the aspects he has experience of. So we hear, for instance, about CiX but Compuserve, where I got my first experience of online networking, isn’t even mentioned. Perhaps there is just a bit too much of Davey himself in the book – interesting though he is – I’d rather the space had been used to fill out more of those missing details.
Although we hear very sensible concerns about the more dubious aspects of the virtual worlds and identity theft, the general tone is positive and supportive. In fact, if anything I’d suggest Winder over-sells virtual life. While he has a very valid point about the opportunities for those with some sort of disadvantage in the real world to overcome that virtually – the majority of his case studies are people who are, in one way or another, damaged goods – what’s less clear is the accuracy of the argument that many people aren’t wasting huge amounts of time in their virtual lives. It might be easier to stay virtual, but I found it difficult not to think how much better they would be putting all that time and effort into achieving something in the real world that will be more lasting and ultimately more fulfilling.
All in all, not a bad book at all – a good introduction to modern virtual worlds and what is possible (and not possible) there – but a little overloaded with feely stuff, and not enough science to back it up.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more