In January 1998 a massive ice storm descended on New York, New England, and eastern Canada. It crushed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, forcing thousands of people into public shelters and leaving millions of others in their homes without electricity. In this riveting book Stephen Doheny-Farina presents an insider's account of these events, describing the destruction of the electric network in his own village and the emergence of the face-to-face interactions that took its place. His stories examine the impact of electronic communications on community, illuminating the relationship between electronic and human connections and between networks and neighborhoods, and exploring why and how media portrayals of disasters can distort authentic experience. Doheny-Farina begins by discussing the disaster and tracing the origins of the storm. He then goes back two hundred years to tell how this particular electric grid was built, showing us the sacrifices people made to create the grids that (usually) connect us to one another. Today's power grid, says Doheny-Farina, has become more vulnerable than we realize, as demand begins to outstrip capacity in urban centers around the nation. His book reminds us what those grids mean-both positively and negatively-to our electronically saturated lives.

In this eloquent exploration of the nature of cyberspace and the increasing virtualization of everyday life, Stephen Doheny-Farina argues that electronic neighborhoods should be less important to us than our geophysical neighborhoods. He Speaks in favor of civic networking, a movement that organizes local information and culture, and shows how new technologies can help reinvigorate our troubled communities.

"The Wired Neighborhood punctures most of the inflated myths about the wondrous Net. Its author also points to one small corner of this datasphere that might build, not erode, community. If you absolutely must remain plugged-in, take his advice about where to aim your mouse". -- Bill McKibben

"Lucid and precise ...invaluable to a nuanced understanding of the technologies now transmogrifying the meaning of community and even reality". -- Utne Reader

"The dilemma Doheny-Farina addresses is a real one that is unlikely to go away, and his book is a useful contribution to the debate.... He writes with an inviting fluency rare in academic Net discourse". -- Charles Shaar Murray, Daily Telegraph

"Doheny-Farina, a shrewd observer of encroaching mediation, makes a number of important points". -- Sven Birkerts, Prevention

"Nowhere online can you find all of these issues summarized or explicated.... I am confident that The Wired Neighborhood will remain an important early analysis of the effects of the Net on our towns and our lives". -- Steve Cisler, Community Networking Currents

"A brave little volume that dares to discuss both sides, fiddling with thought and reason, in an honest quest for insight". -- Burke Campbell, Toronto Globe & Mail

"If Doheny-Farina isn't the first towrite about the Internet with an eye critical to its assumptions and implications, he might well be the most level-headed". -- Paul Maliszewski, Business Journal

"An absorbing work on an important topic". -- Library Journal

Effective Documentation is a major sourcebook that offers technical writers, editors, teachers, and students of technical communication a wide variety of practical guidelines based on often hard to find research in the usability of printed and electronic media.The book's eighteen chapters provide a wealth of material on such topics of current interest as the writing of design manuals, research in cognitive psychology as applied to the design of user manuals, and the organizing of manuals for hierarchical software systems. Included are chapters by such well known scholars in the field as Philip Rubens, Robert Krull, Judith Ramey, and John Carroll.Effective Documentation reviews the advice offered by other "how to produce usable documentation" books, describing the different types of usability research and explaining the inherent biases of each type. It goes beyond the actual design of textual and/or electronic media to look at these designs in context, giving advice on effective management ("good management is a requisite of good writing"), on the relationship between document design and product design, and on how to find out who one's readers really are. Advances in the presentation of textual information are explained, with suggestions on how to improve the usability of individual sentences and the design of entire books.The concluding chapters discuss advances in the design and use of online information and offer valuable insights into the use of graphic information and the development and design of information communicated via electronic media.Stephen Doheny Farina is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Clarkson University. Effective Documentation is included in the Information Systems series, edited by Michael Lesk.