Hermes on Two Wheels: The Sociology of Bicycle Messengers
Wehr'sHermes on Two Wheelsexamines an interesting social phenomenon closely in order to derive insights about the contradictions and challenges of our accelerated era of laptop capitalism. He shows that the Internet-driven post-Fordist era cannot dispense with actual people, who dodge traffic in order to deliver important pulp documents on time. In this, he brilliantly opposes technological optimism, which assumes that utopia is a chatroom. Bicycle messengers, an edgy crew, live on the edges of our fast society and help us see it more clearly. This book is very much in the tradition of Walter Benjamin's study of the Paris Arcades project. Like Benjamin, Wehr examines fragments—tea leaves, as it were—as the resources of a critical social and cultural theory. (Dr. Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington.)