Holding on to reality Book

An elaborate genealogy of information tracing a path of increasing abstraction from the readings of landscapes preliterate societies found themselves embedded in to the present information age (late nineties at the time of publication).

Imagine Sherry Turkle and Hubert Dreyfus coauthoring a book (laid out with loads of formers and latters) and you pretty much get the drift of Holding On to Reality. Borgmann's definitive stance on AI and virtual environments ("Ease of constructing photorealistic settings and depth of artificial intelligence are unavailable, the former for the time being, the latter forever.") is substantiated with an endnote citation of Dreyfus' What Computers Still Can't Do .

Not that it reads with excessive slant. But in spite of the intricate scholarship the genealogy falls flat because it never leaves the human scale. Humans perceive the landscape (self-created and natural); humans perceive their printed symbols, humans perceive their computer-housed virtual environments. It's a trajectory taking us further and further from "reality," from "the real world," where meaning diffuses as we stray from this real base into symbol and abstraction'into mediated realms.

"Perspicuity," "eloquence," "contingency," "ambiguity," "reality" ("the real world"), "meaning," are terms that come up so regularly and systematically that their lack of definition becomes a tripping point. It's never clear what beyond colloquial usage is intended. The reality Borgmann has us losing hold on is somehow an indivisible stratum. As a result, human meaning'becoming denser as it is more and more contiguous with "reality"'is provided a primordial base. That is, meaning (via "reality") is primal to information, where a physicist would have it the other way around. Information is examined through every conceivable lens but the physicist's.

Borgmann doesn't advocate a return to the land, to "our roots," or anything like that. He acknowledges the momentum of information technology and offers a strained bright-side-of-things view with a few poetic praises for the wonders of the modern world. The verdict is ultimately constrained by the model. When reality is a base not malleable to human action, not subdivided by information, pattern recognition and IT, we're advised simply and simply advised to seek balance between mediation and reality.