classics of sociology to explain these changes, and argues that they are largely for the better. We keep in closer touch with our inner circle of friends and family when a phone number can be associated with a person rather than a location. We can even— although Ling only addresses this in passing—create better “loose” connections through mobile social networks such as Twitter.

Ling’s argument is persuasive as far as this goes, but he does himself a disservice by downplaying the ways in which mobile connectedness to your inner circle can lead to disruptive behaviors in the wider social sphere. It’s true, as he says, that an etiquette has developed around such situations as getting a personal phone call during a business meeting, but there is no such etiquette as of yet for the long, loud phone call on the bus. The shared space of the community shouldn’t have to give way to the intimate space of the phone call. If Ling starts taking these concerns more seriously, he will be a writer to recommend highly.

HCI Remixed: Reflections
on Works that Have Influenced
the HCI Community
Edited by Thomas
Erickson and David W.
McDonald
The MIT Press
ISBN-13:
978-0262050883
$40.00

The problems with this
book begin with the
title. Remixes are new
approaches to the same
topic: A musical remix will take
the original track, pull out the
component parts, and layer in
new material to give it a different
feel. Think of the “Gray Album,”
which combines Jay-Z’s lyrics with
the Beatles’ production.
A book called HCI
Remixed, therefore,
seems to promise to
revisit classics of human-
computer interaction
thinking in light of the
newer work being done
in once-recondite fields
like voice recognition
technology or even desk-
top iconography. Sadly,
although the title and
the subtitle promise to
shine new light on the “HCI com-
munity,” the essays included are
primarily personal reminiscences of
limited interest to anyone outside
the academic HCI orbit.

There are occasional flashes of the much better book this could have been: Editor Thomas Erickson’s essay on the relevance of Jane Jacobs’s work on urbanism

for interactive systems is a particular
standout. But what was particularly
striking to
me was how
airless these
reminiscences
were. One
would hardly
know from
this volume
that GUIs
and networks
were so cen-
tral to every-
day life, or
the impact some key ideas in HCI
have had on practitioners in Web
development and design—the only
example of Fitts’s Law cited, for
example, is in the Macintosh OSX.

Early in the book, Henry Lieberman calls for more “ revolutionary, almost crackpot” ideas to revitalize the HCI academic community. But there is already a vital, revolutionary, and occasionally crackpot community discussing HCI issues—a practitioner community of journals like A List Apart and Boxes & Arrows. This book could have been a bridge between the academic and practitioner theoretical communities by showing the continuing value of works from earlier eras for today. As it stands, however, it’s a sign of how fa~r the two sides _{have drifted apart.}

DOI: 10.1145/1377016.1377023

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