Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies

ISBN-13: 9780803975194 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 208 str.

Rob Shields; Robert M. Shields

Opis

'Cultures of Internet' examines the arrival of e-mail and online discussion groups, and considers the prospect of an 'online world' - a playground for virtual bodies in which identities are flexible, swappable and disconnected from real-world bodies.

Recenzje

'The Internet, as the editor notes, has been "over-hyped and over-sensationalised", and has also generated an enormous amount of vacuous and pretentious commentary, much taken with the visionary possibilities of elaborating on Internet life. This collection is not immune to such excesses, but does have a lot of thoughtful and informed commentary.... The collection as a whole is lively and often provocative, and...will be useful to researchers still uncertain about what kind of a beast the Internet is evolving into' - European Journal of Communication

`Eight of his [Shields] contributors are graduate students, which gives the book a much more grounded sense of participation in as well as observation of the cultures with which it engages.... [a] preoccupation with the politics of identity runs through the assembled pieces. Interrogated in well-researched case studies of network censorship in Canada, the institutional struggles over the French Minitel system and the practical contradictions of connectivity in Jamaica, the question of identity is placed solidly in the material world.... among the better contributions to the publishing boom of the last two years... very useful in undergraduate teaching' - Sociology

Spis treści

Introduction - Rob Shields
Virtual Spaces, Real Histories and Living Bodies
Is There Free Speech on the Net? - Leslie Regan Shade
Censorship in the Global Information Infrastructure
The Labyrinth of Minitel - Andr[ac]e Lemos
Cool Runnings - Joerge Dyrkton
The Coming of Cybereality in Jamaica
Is There a Body in the Net? - Katie Argyle and Rob Shields
A Geography of the Eye - Ken Hillis
The Technologies of Virtual Reality
The Coming of Cyberspacetime and the End of the Polity - Dan Thu Nguyen and Jon Alexander
Contradictions in Cyberspace - Interrogate the Internet
Collective Response
Life After Death - Katie Argyle
Are MUDs Communities? - Heather Bromberg
Identity, Belonging and Consciousness in Virtual Worlds
Psychoanalysis and Cyberspace - Mark Lajoie
On the Matrix - Sadie Plant
Cyberfeminist Simulations

O autorze

Rob Shields lectures in Culture and Communication at Lancaster University and maintains links with Carleton University, where he is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. He is author of Places on the Margin (1990) and Lifestyle Shopping (1993), and co-editor of Social Engineering: The Technics of Change (1995).

CONTRIBUTORS OUTSIDE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

David Chaney Durham University

Sadie Plant University of Birmingham

Mike Featherstone Goldsmiths, UK

Andre Lemos Universite Paris V