Trapped in the Net

This text takes a close look at how such familiar and pervasive productions of computing as voice mail, bar codes, laptops and the Web have become embedded in all our lives forcing us to narrow the scope of our choices, our modes of control and our experiences with the real world. Drawing on narratives from fields that range from military command, air traffic control and international fund transfers to library cataloguing and supermarket checkouts, the book shows that we are rapidly making irreversible and at times harmful changes in our business, social and personal lives to comply with the formalities and restrictions of information systems. The threat is not the direct one once framed by the idea of insane robots or runaway mainframes usurping human functions for their own purposes, but rather the gradual loss of control over hardware, software and function through networks of interconnection and dependence. What Rochlin calls the computer trap has four parts: the lure, the snare, the costs and the long-term consequences. The lure is obvious: the promise of ever-more powerful and adapatble tools with simpler and more human-centred interfaces.
The snare is what usually ensues - one heavily invested in the use of computers to perform central tasks, organizations and individuals alike are committed to new capacities and potentials, whether they eventually find them rewarding or not. The varied costs include a dependency on the manufacturers of hardware and software and a seemingly pathological scramble to keep up with an incredible rate of sometimes unnecessary technological change. Finally, a lack of redundancy and an incredible speed of response make human intervention or control difficult at best when something goes wrong. As Rochlin points out, this is particularly true for those systems whose interconnections and mechanisms are so deeply concealed in the components that no human being fully understands them. The full text of "Trapped in the Net" is available on the Princeton Web site, http://pup.princeton.edu.