Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age Book

Some interesting bits, and his literary analyses are stronger than the attempts at cultural history. Jones is less interested in the Luddites than in their legacy. That is, how they've become mythologized and represented in popular culture -- from Romantic poetry to 1960s counterculture to contemporary anti-globalism movements. He makes some interesting points about the Luddites -- that they weren't simply anti-technology but more anti-capitalist-exploitation, and that they used modes of rather complicated symbolic representation (i.e. making up the leader "Ned Ludd," likening themselves to Robin Hood, and so on). And he reads against the grain, taking pieces that are most often interpreted as simply anti-technology (i.e. Frankenstein and William Blake's poetry), arguing for more nuanced considerations of science, machinery, and technology.