Roughly a dozen years ago, when use of the Internet and World Wide Web was first ramping up, I was among a group of journalists to whom media critic and New York University professor Neil Postman delivered an informal talk. To paraphrase his remarks, he contended that we had already solved the problem of access to information and its exchange. What we were now suffering from instead, he said, was a glut of information, engulfing us in quantities we could not possibly assimilate. In an earlier era, we had social institutions, including the media, to filter this information, allowing us to evaluate its provenance and accuracy. When it came to the Web, though, we were on our own. Postman resorted to a biological metaphor, noting that against the free circulation of any virulent allegation on the Internet, we had developed no immune system.

Much has changed, radically and on a mass scale, since Postman made those observations. Witness the advent, since 2004 alone, of Facebook, MySpace (purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580 million), and YouTube (purchased by Google for $1.65 billion). Nielsen ratings of average home Web usage during December 2007 estimate the active U.S. digital media universe to be nearly 154 million strong, spending more than thirty-five hours online in thirty-six sessions, visiting sixty-five domains in the process. No wonder network television is scrambling to get there.

Amid this transformative, quicksilver moment in communications, with “social tools” that theoretically allow for great interconnectivity, are the sorts of questions that Postman raised still relevant? The cultural critic Lee Siegel, in Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, concludes that they are. His book is an articulate and at times counterintuitive jeremiad against the commercial tide and shopworn stereotypes of Internet culture,...

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