Book Reviews 577

malls. To prevent analogous problems arising as a consequence of electronic highways they suggest that services should be subject to evaluative trials, should be regulated to ensure that other forms of communication continued to flourish, and that participative electronic democracy should form art of the processes of evaluation and regulation.

This survey of the contents of just one of the eight parts in this very large compilation of papers suggests that Kling has done an excellent job in identifying both the controversies and the contributions to those controversies. This is a source-book that will date, inevitably, but many of the papers will remain classic contributions to the debate. Furthermore, since this is the second edition of the work, we may perhaps hope for another edition in the new millenium.

Every information scientist, information manager, librarian, telecommunications specialist (as well as AI Gore) will profit from having access to this book--preferably on his or her desk. The book will also serve as a very useful collection of sources for students studying the impact of computers on society in the late 20th century.

REFERENCES

Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: identi~, in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual communi~: homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Deparment of lnformation Studies TOM WILSON University of Sheffield Sheffield S I O 2TN U.K,

Cognition and Complexity: The Cognitive Science of Managing Complexity. W. W. REEVES. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD 0996). xviii+ 170 pp., ISBN 0-8108-3101-5.

Cognition and Complexity is about information complexity or information overload, and how it can be overcome by the creation of an ad hoc schema for selecting and assimilating the information, which Reeves calls an "understanding heuristic". The book is divided into three parts. In part 1, Reeves sets out the problem of information overload within the context of postindustrial society. In part 2, he examines how we assimilate and organize information (schemata theory, Piaget, and other integrative thinking theories). And in part 3, Reeves describes the "understanding heuristic" itself, which is based on the theories described in part 2.

The basic idea behind this book is not uninteresting. We assimilate information via a schema, which is a mental representation of what we already know about a given topic. For a topic we know a lot about, the schema allows us to filter out or cut through irrelevant information so that only (potentially) meaningful information has to be attended to. How can a person who knows little or nothing about a new topic quickly set up a schema that will serve the same purpose?

Reeves proposes a method of creating an ad hoc schema, called an "understanding heuristic", whereby someone who knows nothing about a topic can quickly set-up a framework for the topic; this brings the person into an "intermediate zone" somewhere between a novice and an expert for the particular topic being examined (p. 115); this is good enough, according to Reeves, to enable him or her to filter out irrelevant information. The "understanding heuristic" therefore facilitates the process of understanding, and prevents information overload.

To illustrate how the "understanding heuristic" works, Reeves gives the example of John, an 18 year old who has been left $10,000 by his grandmother. John must invest the money in a mutual fund, something he knows nothing about. What John must do is set up for himself an "understanding heuristic" which will allow him to select and process information about mutual funds so that he can invest the money properly. The heuristic is set up in l0 stages. In stage 1, the historical context for investing money in a mutual fund is provided, which is primarily a history of mutual funds. In stage :2, the jargon used in the mutual fund industry is given: what is an "equity", what is a "dividend", etc. Stage 9 creates questions John should ask an informed expert on how to invst in a mutual fund. Stage 10 gives an overall theme to investing in mutual funds--i .e, the balancing of risk and security for your money (p. 146-152). The resulting "understanding heuristic" would enable the user to select relevant information and screen out irrelevant information. One can see the application for this in software design, where the end user accessing a new topic would be led through a schema building exercise by the computer.

Reeves' description of the "understanding heuristic", and the example he gives to illustrate it, is

578 Book Reviews

interesting on an intuitive level. The rest of the book, however, is so badly written and put together it is almost unreadable. The information theories are just thrown in, and they seem wrong (or at the very least, they are oddly put). For example, according to Reeves, "information" is defined in physics "as 'former' negentropic force in universe" (p. 22). What is 'former', what does it mean in physics? And what is 'negentropic force', what does it mean in physics? In an analysis of what information is, these issues and the relationship of information to the Second Law of Thermodynamics are worth examining. Instead, Reeves quotes someone who trivializes them by equating information with a warrior leading the fight against the "spirit of the Second Law" (p. 21).

A second example: Reeves "summarized" Shannon's definition of information "as quantity of signal 'non-sense'" (p. 19). At certain moments in Shannon's (Shannon and Weaver, 1949) mathematical theory of communication, it may seem that Shannon equates information with "noise", but he does not (see Weaver's distinction between desirable and undesirable information or "noise").

Reeves should not have bothered with negentropy and Shannon; they are not explained to us well enough for us to see how they contribute to his "understanding heuristic." The same can be said of his whirlwind review of theories of problem solving, learning, critical thinking and integrative thinking. The sentence where Reeves gives their reason for being in this book is unhelpful in this regard, and demoralizing:

The fundamental goal of the work is to synthesize a single meta-approach from the diversity of approaches available, eclectically taking the most applicable items from each (p. xvii).

(These awful early chapters should have been rewritten or even eliminated and replaced with something else (see below for a suggestion), after the author finally discovered what the book was actually about (his belated attempt to anchor the stages of the "understanding heuristic" in one or other of these theories (p. 133-135) is not convincing)).

What is the audience for this book? It is in large print, subdivided into short sections for easy reading, and there are remarkably few citations for a topic so carefully examined by others. Therefore, one might conclude the book was intended for advanced undergraduates or as an introduction to the subject of information for masters students. But the writing style is so elliptical that it seems the book is more an interior inquiry than an attempt to communicate outwardly to others, leading one to conclude that Reeves' intention was to make an original contribution to the fields of information science, AI, and IR (altough he cites almost no one from these fields).

But only the second last chapter where he describes his "understanding heuristic" makes this original contribution. What he should have done in the earlier parts of the book is to tell us how he arrived at the "understanding heuristic's" ten parts. They seem intuitively interesting (even inspired), but why were they chosen over others, and why did he put them in this order? I found this "understanding heuristic" insightful, but better to read a concise version of it in a journal.

REFERENCE

Shannon, C. E. and Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, IL: The Universtity of lllionois Press.

Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

CHARLESCOLE