Theodore Roszak. The Cult of Information. A Neo-Luddite Treatise on Heigh-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking. 2nd Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 

Roszak points out as early as the Preface that he is not writing from the perspective of "doctrinaire technophobia" and that he has a "healthy respect" for the computer's many and diverse capabilities. Instead, his concern is with "morally questionable uses of computer power" and inflated claims that need challenging. In short, the argument in The Cult of Information is not with computer technology per se but with a computer "folklore" that entails promises of power and well-being. Key to this folklore are the concepts and words information and Information Age, which, when used in a computer context, come to signify "what the relics of the True Cross were in the Age of Faith: emblems of salvation" (xiv).

Not only has information all too often come to define and/or signify corporate interests, science, and government affairs, "the Information Age has now entered the educational curriculum in an aggressive and particularly insidious way which could distort the meaning of thought itself" (xiv). This constitutes, for Roszak, both a critical juncture in education and the major concern and focus of his book. At issue is the popularly implied analogy between the computer's ability to store data and the human memory and logical procedures and human reasoning, an analogy that influences cult members to conclude that a computer's ability corresponds to human thinking (xiv). In short, Roszak challenges any suggestion that the computer is a model of the human mind, for the implications of such a conclusion seriously undermine education -- "the line that divides mind from machine is being blurred." Moreover, he argues that "the powers of reason and imagination which the schools exist to celebrate and strengthen are in danger of being diluted with low grade mechanical counterfeits" (xv).

The Cult of Information, for Roszak, has been as much birthed by academies and scientific laboratories as it has by the marketplace, all too often for power and profit. If, he warns, the cult is allowed to permeate education, the sorry repercussion may well be a "rising generation of students seriously hampered in its capacity to think through the social and ethical questions that confront us as we pass through the latest stage of the ongoing industrial revolution" (xvi).

The human mind, for Roszak, is as much a miracle as any religious tenet and the pursuit of philosophy. Given the glory of the human mind, Roszak is not about to reduce or subject it to a reductionism implied by semiconductors in metal boxes. In the final analysis, the computer should be seen for what it is -- "a valuable public servant" (xvi).

Contents for The Cult of Information include but are not limited to the following chapters: The Data Merchants, Computers and Pure Reason, The Computer and the Counterculture, The Politics of Information, Descartes's Angel: Reflections on the True Art of Thinking.