Book details of 'Detour: The Truth About the Information Superhighway'

Title	Detour: The Truth About the Information Superhighway
Author(s)	Michael Sullivan-Trainor
ISBN	1568843070
Language	English
Published	November 1994
Publisher	Hungry Minds, Inc

---

Back to shelf World Wide Web
Amazon.com info for Detour: The Truth About the Information Superhighway

Score:

Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Detour: The Truth About the Information Superhighway':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Once upon a time there was a space agency. They realized that writing and note-taking would be vitally important, even in a high-tech spacecraft. They also realized that ordinary pens do not work well upside down and require gravity to ensure a dependable flow of ink. A tender called for submissions for the design and production of a "space pen" which would write right side up, upside down, or in the absence of gravity. It was also to write in a vacuum, or even under water. Someone submitted a pencil. This is known as a reality check. I wish it were as easy to get the authors of information superhighway books to take a reality check. "Detour" is YAISB (Yet Another Information Supercliche Book) with yet another "gee whiz," Space Cadet, look at the blue-sky future, and yet another compilation of recycled press releases and promotional blurbs. The book is short on analysis, insight and real information. The cover's promise of "Revealing Interviews with Industry Experts" is limited to quotes from said experts' writing in other publications. A careful reading makes it difficult to quibble with the precise wording of the book, but the portrayal of many topics is oddly distorted or incomplete. The usual round of experiments and trial runs are presented as if they had some significance as models for the future. Comments on the Microsoft/IBM partnership might seem profound to the uninitiated, but are merely out of touch. The Pentium is the "fastest" central processing unit? -- This person has never heard of MIPS? SPARC? Alpha? PowerPC? or any mini or mainframe processors? A sudden (and odd) mention of computer viral programs betrays no knowledge of the reality of either viral technology or the actual level of the threat. The few pieces of hard information in the book recur in several places in broad outline, if not specific wording. As usual, the work purports to talk of global information access, but limits specifics to the United States. Much of the material creates wild flights of fancy based on very little fact. It is intriguing to note that some of the strongest writing in the book uses not any industry pronouncement, not any academic study, not any expert forecast, but episodes of the "Star Trek" TV show. For all the preceding, the author doesn't create very appetizing sales pitches for the Infobahn: since the market for the thousand-page printed version of "The Haldeman Diaries" is probably limited, who cares if you can get twice as much electronically? The best part of the book is probably the beginning of chapter eight, where Sullivan-Trainor essays to "prove" that neither the government, the utilities (cable and telephone companies), nor the communication (media) industry can build the projected highway. Unfortunately, he only seems to be able to maintain this quality of writing for a few pages before reverting to the unfocused, repetitive and enthusiastic style of the rest of the book. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995
Add my review for Detour: The Truth About the Information Superhighway