computer and other information a d media technology create a simulation of reality-reference toan infinite order of signs rather than to real finite objects. Modernity was the reality of finite, real objects through which persons could signify themselves; in the African context this was not achieved, but the computer allows it to be left behind. In following Baudrillard, Jules-Rosette also adopts his method, which is less concemed with the description of real people in real places and social relations than with the objects through which alone our notions of self and society are created (cf. Miller I99I:I 65). Throughout the book claims are made for individual, organizational, or national attitudes to computers and computer adoption which are said to be examples of aspirations towards postmodemity (e.g., p. I53), but I often wondered how this could have been inferred from the evidence presented. At the second level, the book is to my mind more interesting but incomplete; here it deals with the adoption of the computer as part of some on-going sociocosmology, and I would suggest hat at this second level the reading is contradictory to the first. Jules-Rosette ends her book with two traditional African folktales. Both of these tales are about the struggle of humans and their technologies against the forces of nature, and both are related to examples of contemporary computer adoption in the Kenyan context. In fact, Jules-Rosette suggests that there is a strong resemblance between one of these narratives and an item in the I985 issue of East Africa Computer News. Can we interpret this homology as based on culturally enduring images and idioms that find expression in both the tales and the contexts of computer adoption? And does this homology-to which the author also points in the case of the Mami Watasuggest hat what is aspired towards is not some sense of the postmodern but a more complicated cultural imagery? Unfortunately, Jules-Rosette only touches on this possibility, quickly dismissing it because it is in danger of explicitly contradicting the first-level reading (i.e., the model). Instead we are told: Buried within African cultural traditions, in this case the Kamba folktale, are the kernels of a postmodem, utopian dream (P. 341). It is perplexing that these tales and the mermaid figure were not placed at the beginning or at least signalled there. If they had been, many of the narratives in the book would have been contextualised ifferently; but this would probably have meant abandoning the fourstage model and letting the ethnography take a different shape and form. And, alas, that would have meant a different book and a different review.