Release 2.0 : A Design for Living in the Digital Age

By Esther Dyson

'Release 2.0' by Esther Dyson, a well known Internet figure, is a chatty, fairly simplified series of discussions on the human role in the online

communities of the Internet. Heavily loaded with anecdotes and personal reminisces, Release 2.0 nevertheless manages to convey some very important ideas about how human beings interact with the technologies they create.

Release 2.0 lacks real organization and focus, and much like the Internet discussion groups, was spawned from dozens of important concepts and ideas like a fireworks display, and yet fails to follow most of them up. The prose is often clumsy and the examples are irrelevant, but despite all this the book is invaluable in explaining the Internet in such a way that the average person can grasp an idea of the progress of its evolution. With the current growth and constant evolution of the Internet and the publishing process being what it is, it is impossible to expect any book to be timely and technically up to date. Therefore, Dyson's focus is not so much the specifications of current technologies or the latest Internet gadget from recent three day wonders, but the way in which ordinary people live day after day with their online communities.

When we think of the Internet, we very often think of web pages, which are in the end about as interactive as a phone marketing system. Dyson does not see the Internet simply as a giant information vending service or a global shopping mall where orders and catalogs fly from one end of the Earth to the other. The Internet is also a human community, and beyond the business and corporate layers there is the vital human layer in which people use the Internet to interact with others.

Anyone who has ever used the YU system for chatting on IRC or floated amongst America Online chat rooms knows quite well that the frivolous entertainment-based use of a technology can quickly come to outnumber the constructive results-oriented version of that same technology. Today there are a variety of forums and methods which allow multiple groups of people to meet and talk. Such groups often become regular sessions creating online communities. An online community is a social structure and any social structure quickly brings up issues of power, abuse and freedom, which are at the core of any community. Release 2.0 looks at online communities and the Internet not simply as a set of problems and solutions but as a mirror of who we are as people and what can be expected from us.

The creation of new technologies is not simply a one-way process, as we modify the technologies, the technologies also modify us. Through using them, we form new patterns of social organization. With the Internet, we have reduced issues of distance and effort to a near-zero.

But in what ways will that technology change us? Where digital visionaries suggest that the Internet will radically transform our society and us, Dyson suggests that the changes are not likely to be very dramatic. Citing mostly the experiences of her and her friends, Dyson suggests that people will behave online much as they would behave in the real world, but fails to offer any real evidence to support her ideas. Her vision is a fairly conservative one of a world where the Internet is a lot like a phone data bank, but a friendly phone data bank. While the vision of many techno-gurus is rooted in the future, Release 2.0 is rooted firmly in the present and in how people behave and think, and while in time, Dyson will likely be proven wrong the book remains an interesting read and an effective introduction to the issues and ideas of the Internet today."