960 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The claim is often made that computer-mediated activity repre sents, or will eventuate in, a complete break with all prior human experience. This is particularly the case with respect to virtual reality, an ambiguous term which at a minimum includes a disconnection between our perceptions and the usual sources of the stimuli influ encing those perceptions. The term implies suspension of disbelief so strong as to erase all consciousness of illusion. Nevertheless, as the authors in this volume point out, it is a suspension rather than an erasure. Hardware does not and will not cease to exist by virtue of cyberspace: on the contrary, it is an ongoing necessity. Nor will cyberspace eliminate the physical reality of our “meat” bodies. Con nection, rather than discontinuity, is the common theme of these essays. The material bases of disembodied electronic futures are often as transparent to the analyst as they are predicted to be for the user. The authors in this volume examine both the overt political implica tions of virtual reality and the hidden assumptions and agendas be ing built into cyberspace. Within this context, questions of symbol ism and metaphysics, of power relations and human agency, of resource utilization and ecological impact are all vigorously ad dressed. The essays place virtual reality and other cyberspace entities squarely within the framework of history, but fail to draw any paral lels with the historical development and social functions of other expressive media. The actual impact of such “democratizing” tech nologies as print, cinema, and television are ignored. The degree to which present technology falls short of the virtual-reality dream is only briefly discussed (p. 5); the disjunction between potential utility and the most likely actual use is relegated to a footnote (p. 145). Bayla Singer Dr. Singer is an independent scholar residing in Florida. After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries. By Miles Orvell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Pp. xix+200; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Miles Orvell’s wide-ranging collection of essays (with accompa nying illustrations) insightfully explores the complex and evolving impact of technology on the modern and postmodern imagination. “We have all . . . been born ‘after the machine,’ ” Orvell writes, and we must be alert to the consequences of our saturation with its products—especially the visual artifacts of the camera, a tool that TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 961 provides “a way of refining and dramatizing social ideas, a way of shaping our emotional response to the world.” Orvell frames these essays with Walt Whitman’s prophetic chal lenge to artists after the Civil War to develop a “bold” language that would embrace the possibilities created by “science and the mod ern.” Whitman’s progressive, democratic vision inspired early 20thcentury precisionists such as Charles Sheeler, whose studies of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant seemed an iconic celebra tion of the breathtaking scale and efficiency engineered by Ford and Taylor. But the absence ofworkers in his images reveals an unmistak able disquiet beneath the surface, Orvell argues—a warning about the vulnerability of human beings before the “terrifying” power of the factory. In terms of its structures, transportation, and planning, Sheeler pays homage to the Rouge as a model self-contained city. “But there is nothing of the civitas here, there are few people and hardly any movement. It is a dead city.” The retreat from Whitman’s utopianism had already begun. Orvell moves easily between “high” and “mass” culture—the ma chine inexorably blurs and even erases such boundaries—as he pro ceeds from Buster Keaton’s silentfilms to a core set ofessays examin ing the problematic relationship between “documentary” artists and their subjects. Lewis Hine helped lay the foundations for social activism behind the camera with his humanizing photographs of im migrants and miners, but the contradictions of the documentary en terprise remained unresolved. What is the line between truth-telling and manipulation, empathy and exploitation? When do aesthetic or commercial concerns undermine journalistic or reform purposes? Walker Evans worried aloud about these issues in assembling his rec ord of depression-era poverty in Let...