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Rating: 
Summary: Provocative and Important
Review: Curling up with The Anarchist in the Library was a bit like sitting down with an old friend - literally, since I'll admit to knowing the author as a friend and colleague. So, perhaps I am not the most objective reviewer in this series of remarks, but I find much to admire in Siva Vaidhyanathan's latest work. In fact, Siva Vaidhyanathan has opened my mind to a thread in American culture that I had not given much attention to in my studies - the relevance of anarchy as a system of rapid, unmediated, decentralized form of communication. In my loose lifting from the text, Vaidhyanathan defines anarchy as nonhierarchical, radically democratic, "organization through disorganization." He posits the meaningful history of anarchy - from Diogenes, to the French Revolution, to Emma Goldman, to peer-to-peer networking - against the ongoing corporatization of information in the mass media and government.
The importance Vaidhyanathan places on anarchic communication in contemporary culture casts another perspective onto the current debates on peer-to-peer networks, Internet blogs, the music industry, and American cultural policy. Vaidhyanathan writes, "Digitization and networking make anarchy relevant in ways it has not been before. Global electronic networks make widespread anarchistic activity possible. What used to happen in a neighborhood barbershop or on a park bench now happens across a nation-state or beyond. Rumors can bubble up into action." Vaidhyanathan's desire to illuminate the importance of anarchy as a means of community involvement and springboard for social movements is a powerful and even "radical" idea. And yet, his point is also to reinstate that anarchy is an aspect of daily life - not radical, but a mainstay of human interactions. The challenge is when corporate and legislative restrictions threaten to shut down these lines of communication and stifle dissent.
I was surprised by how moving I found the book to be as a whole. Told in the first person, and with the lucid prose of a former reporter, Anarchist in the Library is ultimately a passionate and insightful book about cultural freedom and censorship.
Rating: 
Summary: A Critical Message Lost in the Haze
Review: I had a graduate school professor who used to talk about his fog index.
This professor of Communications Theory believed, as do I, that writers and teachers who understand their material, are capable of expressing themselves in simple, declarative sentences. Those did not understand their material, went his corollary, resorted to compound, complex sentences to mask their lack of understanding. This continuum, he termed "The Fog Index."
Unfortunately for me, this was probably the only lecture by this professor I understood that semester.
In this book Siva Vaidhyanathan posits there are dangers posed by the increasing speed and amount of information available. We resort, he says, to technological fixes to avoid discussions of the often complex and serious issues presented by this explosion.
This conflict manifests itself when someone invents a device, algorithm or law that moves the system of digital information towards freer distribution. The other side responds by pushing the distribution system back into their previous restraints.
The book outlines several examples:
* The battle to control public libraries, which are seen as breeding grounds for terrorism and pornography.
* Attempts to restrict the use and distribution of encryption technology to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists and criminals.
* Efforts by governments to regulate personal computers and networks to control illicit flows of material.
* Commercial and governmental efforts to regulate science and mathematics, including the human genome.
Unfortunately for me, and I believe, society, that is about all I understood. Vaidynanathan's arguments get lost in his fogged-in writing style. Hopefully, time will bring clarity to his writing. His message is critical to a society that treasurers its civil liberties.
Rating:
Summary: George's review
Review: In "The Anarchist in the Library", Dr. Vaidhyanathan progressively and analytically demonstrates through historical and contemporary cultural examples how our "information age" is evolving. This is an essential read, because its scope is imperitive to all citizens. It is empowering, because it is thought provocative long after you put it down, and places primacy on you- the individual and your future. Lastly, it is very enjoyable, because the author accomplishes all this with a highly personable prose that somehow manages to incorporate technical facts and daily, highly relevant examples to reinforce his thesis.
Rating:
Summary: Very important and very timely---yet very readable!
Review: Siva Vaidhyanathan has written another book that (again!) establishes him as one of the sharpest young media thinkers emerging on the cultural scene. An American Studies scholar by training, Vaidhyanathan has an interdiscipliniary background that is everywhere apparent in his approach to complex, sprawling issues such as copyright (as in his excellent first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs) and now in the perplexities of digitality, the subject of his new title, The Anarchist in the Library. Issues of privacy, intellectual property, creative freedom... this book pokes the major sore spots throbbing underneath our blithely digital epoch, though it does so in unexpected ways.This not the same old "paint by numbers" approach to cultural studies in which a problem is identified, denounced, and remedied (in the abstract) by a few cursory nods toward the self-evident. Rather, this book takes unexpected turns that never lose the reader's interest or passion. Perhaps this is because Vaidhyanathan is blessed (or cursed by those academics suspicious of such fluency) with an inviting prose style that adds considerable charm to even his most polemical passages---this fluency may be why he is finding such success as a public intellectual, appearing in the pages of Salon, NY Times, etc., as well as on television and the net (he is a well-known blogger at www.sivacracy, one of the few I read outside of Eric Alterman's). Bottom line: I'm teaching an Honors course on Media Studies next year and I expect to use this book with my students---it seems ideally pitched for both serious students and general readers alike.
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT! and very enjoyable....
Review: This book is so full of information and ideas that it seems almost impossible to do justice to them all. In discussing the parallels between vast and possibly ungovernable world of the internet, and the complexity of idea exchange in the real world, Dr. Vaidhyanathan broadens the discussion of Internet and file sharing policies. While I am personally interested in the future of the music industry, I found the book most compelling as it discusse the theories and rationales behind our systems of governing intellectual property. Dr. Vaidhyanathan's book covers not only the ideologies behind Napster, but also issues of copyright law, public libraries, online political dissent, hackers, the effect of Limp Bizkit in the music industry and more. Ultimately, Dr. Vaidhyanathan is a humanist, and that propels both the idea behind his book and his accessible, fluent writing style. Instead of offering easy answers to convoluted problems The Anarchist in the Library delves deeper into the social theories that motivate our laws and attempts to govern information exchange--both in the real world and the virtual one. Should we be willing to sacrifice human connection in order to hook up every human to the internet? Do we want a strict copyright law that works as a censoring device? Isn't anarchy in music the norm, rather than a recent technological development? You will close this book with questions, but that is a good thing. It will encourage you to learn and debate more about a variety of subjects that initially seemed to complicated to consider. This, along with Dr. Vaidhyanathan's first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, is a must for anyone interested in communication, globilization and Internet studies in the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: This is a great book that covers a lot of subject starting with the history of some of the great anarchist's to the anarchist's of today. The book doesn't just focus on file sharing and the music industry, but uses that example to show how we need to prepare to share information in the future. The book talks about how the music industry, entertainment industry, software companies and even medical research companies are restricting access to information and all kinds of things. These companies are restricting access to information and eventually stopping the development of our culture. We need to insist on companies providing us with the truth and not just what they want to tell us. We need to insist on the truth and use all the resources to get that information. The internet is a great resource to get information and distribute information. But companies and countries are looking to regulate even access to the internet and the information we have access to. The book does give some solutions on how we can insist on the truth and information. This is a great book and provides a lot of good suggestions, and stories on how things are being setup to restrict information and how we need to start making sure we demand companies to provide us information as investors and customers. We need to send a message to these companies that we are not going to accept these restrictions. One good example is the story I read about Walmart who is demanding the music companies to drop music CD prices below $10.00 if they want to continue to sell music at their stores. This is a good example of how one company can influence an industry. So should we all become anarchist's, not quite according to the book "Anarchy is a reaction, not a vision or solution that can produce the best society and the best human future." But anarchist will help us get to where we all want to be. We not only need anarchist but we need people who can change the way information is processed and distributed. We need companies that are willing to be honest and share information with all there employees and customers. This is a geat book and I would recommend it to anyone..
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