Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing,by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2002. viii + 172 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-262-13398-9.

Recent developments in technology have transformed the telephone from an exclusively interpersonal medium to an interactive electronic mass medium. The diffusion of innovations framework was applied to examine whether adoption of audiotext and 1–900 services is related to use of functionally similar entertainment media. Findings suggest that adoption of audio information services was more powerfully explained by media use patterns than demographics.     

Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication,by Ronald E. Rice,Maureen McCreadie,and Shan-Ju L. Chang. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2001. xiii + 357 pp., $45.00. ISBN 0-262-18214-9.

Critics have argued that information and communication technologies (ICTs) disconnect people from their social networks and reduce public participation. Research in support of this perspective has been biased by two assumptions. The first is a tendency to privilege the Internet as a social system removed from the other ways people communicate. The second is a tendency to favor broadly supportive strong social ties. Survey and ethnographic observations from Netville, a 2-year community networking experiment, suggest that weak, not strong ties experience growth as a result of ICTs. By examining a unique and underexplored stage in the life cycle of a community networking project, the end of a networking trial, this article demonstrates how ICTs facilitate community participation and collective action (a) by creating large, dense networks of relatively weak social ties and (b) through the use of ICTs as an organizing tool.