This review could be done in a few words: do not buy this book. It is made redundant by its own subject, and it is not well presented. Such assessments hardly make for the most enlightening review though, and rather than just focus on the limited uses of Experience in Cyberspace, I want to look at the views taken on this subject by the author, Abdul Alkalimat, a sociologist, and current editor of the H-Af-Am listserv.

The book is an introductory guide to the Internet, listing websites that deal with various aspects of the ‘black experience’. To begin with, there is a certain irony in the fact that someone would print such a guide. As Alkalimat himself recognizes, “the web is alive and part of it is born and part of it dies every hour.” [105] From the moment this guide left the press in 2004 it was already quickly falling out of date, and one would have to hope given the many pitfalls and shortcomings of the current work, that serious thought would be given before a subsequent, updated edition was contemplated. Already some domains are obsolete. In printing the web addresses of various sites the work also presumes that readers will type in lengthy addresses rather than search them via an engine. I wonder how many people will key in SNCC’s position paper on Vietnam, for example [204] (lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SNCC_VN.html)?

Pitched at high-school students and teachers, librarians, and the general reader, the work is arranged in two parts, History (10 chapters) and Culture (20 chapters). Each chapter begins with a passage about how such issues have affected African Americans, and a number of websites that deal with various aspects of the topic are listed thereafter (ranging from 27 in a chapter about gays/lesbians, to 60 on music). Most of the sites I viewed were really interesting, and there is no doubting that the author has provided a good sampling of what is on offer. Some sites do not chime with the chapter topic however, like when those relating to the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ [85] are discussed in ‘Urban Life’. Discussion of the desegregation of the US armed forces in a chapter on ‘Great Migrations’ is similarly ill-conceived. At the end of each chapter further reading sections are provided—sections annoyingly titled ‘Good Books’—and these too are rather idiosyncratic. A chapter on ‘De-Industrialization’ notes the author’s own work [93], whilst failing to pay homage to Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis [1996], a work that catalysed recent discussions about the topic.

Experience in Cyberspace cannot be recommended for its prose or it stylistic merits: it has neither. Yet our author seems quite content with the few constructions he knows to the extant that in one passage five consecutive sentences contain some form of “there is/are…” [25-6]. Repetition of words does not just occur across sentences, but within them too. In the chapter on food a passage is concluded with the warning that “there are aspects of soul food that need to be changed to impact the types of diseases that impact Black people.” [133] Alkalimat’s commentary is not just difficult to read, it is also confusing. In an introductory section to the chapter on health the reader is told that “Black people have been an essential source of labor, hence a minimal level of health has been necessary to keep the US economy going.” [114] Glib comments such as “Black people work in all areas of health care” overlook significant details, like the lack of African Americans in certain areas of healthcare, for example psychiatry.

Editing of this material is poor, such that one has to hope that the book was never edited. Indeed, there are more widows and orphans here than in a nineteenth-century poorhouse; the text has more cosmetic blemishes than a classroom of the teenagers for which it is intended. Web addresses, for the most part, appear in working order, though I only sampled a random number. On occasion addresses are carelessly printed twice, one needlessly under the other [165, 230].

What rankled me most about this work, however, and there was much that did, was the author’s triumphalist praise for the Internet. His feeling that it is the “most democratic method for gathering and [2] sharing information”, available to “everyone” [1] overlooks the factors of wealth, education, and privilege that determine who gets access to this technology. Arguably the influence of such factors is even more wide reaching than in publishing with everyone denied complete access by institutional passwords, and the need to purchase. Alkalimat’s lack of consideration for the provenance of this material is equally troubling. Descriptions of websites seldom mention the organization or individual(s) who maintain the site, and a number of references lead to advocacy groups.

If anything good can be found in this book, it is perhaps the hope that some scholar will realize the interesting discussion that could be had about the Internet’s potentialities as a means for re-conceptualizing understandings of black diaspora. Although the author’s indiscriminate use of ‘Black’ and ‘African American’ bludgeons such possibilities, Alkalimat is surely correct in claiming the technology’s unrivalled ability to connect people across the globe. Exploring how this might affect our understandings of race, political alliance, and genealogy is surely a topic worthy of pursuit.