LEE SIEGEL

From the author hailed by the "New York Times Book Review "for his "drive-by brilliance" and dubbed by the "New York Times" "Magazine "as "one of the country''s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics" comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet. Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It''s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn''t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven''t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products--such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the "bourgeois bohemian"--have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused "self-expression" with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine--that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity. Siegel''s argument isn''t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, "Against the Machine" will force you to see our culture--for better and worse--in an entirely new way.

Ser humano en la era de la multitud digital Leo Siegel, uno de los críticos más incisivos y perspicaces de Estados Unidos, analiza en este ensayo las opiniones más extendidas sobre la cultura digital para ofrecer una vision brillante y polemica sobre lo que nunca se dice sobre ella. Para Siegel, lejos de ser la maxima expresion de libertad y democracia, Internet y otros fenomenos coetaneos nos llevan, como personas y como sociedad, hacia el narcisismo mas letal y demoledor al tiempo que nos alejan precisamente de aquello que constituye la base de la democracia: la conciencia critica. La informacion ilimitada, las posibilidades de autoexpresion, la democratizacion de la cultura, la comodidad? Segun el autor, todas las pretendidas ventajas de la Red no constituyen sino una cortina de triunfalismo que oculta sus limitaciones, riesgos y peligros. Una vision brillante y controvertida, imprescindible para cualquiera que desee una vision profunda y critica del fenomeno cultural mas trascendente de nuestro tiempo.