There are two important acronyms in the title of this book, ICT and IFIP. The first one did not mean anything to me, and I had to read the back cover in order to discover that it means “information and communication technologies.” The second one, IFIP (which stands for “International Federation for Information Processing”), is an acronym I have known for many years, but I was surprised that it continued to exist, as well as its technical committees, and the working groups that are their constituents. Some of these working groups have had their moment of fame, for example, WG 2.1, which defined Algol 68, or WG 2.3, which gathered an impressive collection of future Turing Award recipients. Looking at the IFIP site (http://www.ifip.or.at/) is really interesting, especially when noting that some members of some working groups have lasted for more than 40 years. One cannot refrain from imagining the meetings of some working groups as social meetings of long-bearded (there is generally only one token female in most of them) veterans.

This book emanates from Technical Committee 9, “Relationship Between Computers and Society.” It gathers papers from several members of this committee, coming from various countries. They were triggered by an “apprehension about the technocratic nature of various ’Information Society’ policies,” and they contain “critical voices on the nature of and the social consequences” of this emerging concept.

Thus, such a book deals with an important matter, and it should be read by anybody who feels concerned by the future and consequences of our science. Unfortunately, the collected papers are of unequal value, in my opinion at least. Some of them simply develop very general concepts at length and are boring. Several of them describe the various policies enforced in various parts of the world and are too dissimilar to allow an easy comparison. Of course, it is very difficult to describe in the same way the situation in Africa, China, or the US, but some effort should have been made. The editors explain that “they felt inappropriate to use a common template in the production of the book.” This is also obvious in the second part of the book, which focuses on various issues and thematic policies, and really lacks unity.

For me, the important contribution of this book may be the large bibliographies that end most papers. The subject index is probably too short to be really useful. The papers I read with the greatest interest (but my opinion is certainly biased) are the following ones: “Perspectives and Policies on ICT in Africa,” by Jonathan Miller; “Controlling and Enhancing the Information Society in the United States,” by J.A.N. Lee; “The Relation of Computers and Work,” by Peter Mambrey; “Ethics of Computing,” by Penny Duquenoy; and “Integrating Historical and Societal Contexts in the Computing Curricula,” by John Impagliazzo, J.A.N. Lee, and David C. Cassidy.