Full name: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

Author: Ellen Ullman Year: 1997 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, Memoirs, Science, Business Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9781250002488 9780872863323 0872863328

Here is a candid account of the life of a software engineer who runs her own computer consulting business out of a live-work loft in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch. Immersed in the abstract world of information, algorithms, and networks, she would like to give in to the seductions of the programmer's world, where "weird logic dreamers" like herself live "close to the machine." Still, she is keenly aware that body and soul are not mechanical: desire, love, and the need to communicate face to face don't easily fit into lines of code or clicks in a Web browser. At every turn, she finds she cannot ignore the social and philosophical repercussions of her work. As Ullman sees it, the cool world of cyberculture is neither the death of civilization nor its salvation - it is the vulnerable creation of people who are not so sure of just where they're taking us all. Similar books: Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick iWoz by Steve Wozniak Future Crimes by Marc Goodman Life in Code by Ellen Ullman Blackbird by Jennifer Lauck Still Waters by Jennifer Lauck Over the Top by Jonathan Van Ness I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary Disrupted by Dan Lyons Myself When Young by Daphne Du Maurier In Spite of Myself by Christopher Plummer Then Again by Diane Keaton My Life as a Quant by Emanuel Derman Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Better by Atul Gawande Do No Harm by Henry Marsh