Reviewed by Holly Crawford
“One of the most important human stories of the twentieth century is the impact of technology on the way we live, die, work, and play. This will continue into the twenty-first century. Usually discussions of technology are either blissfully pro or darkly con. Most of the time, people do not discuss technology at all.” So begins the preface of Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day’s Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, a book which exhorts its readers to discuss technology critically without falling prey to using the rhetoric of technological utopianism or dystopianism. Indeed, Nardi and O’Day want its perceived audience, “people who work with and around technology” (e.g. librarians, teachers, secretaries, engineers, professors), to become, as they see themselves: “critical friends” of technology who have begun the process of questioning, at the local level, why and how technology is used and to what end.