One of the most fascinating dimensions of online chat and cybersex are the ways that their medium, the Internet, allows people to reconfigure relationships between self, body, and social interaction. Online chat participants discursively write a self into existence in a disembodied medium that allows for extreme fluidity and multiplicity; cybersex participants evoke bodies in words and images, manipulating relationships between selfhood and the corporeal body. Perhaps never before have so many people been actively involved in social psychological experiments in which they redefine themselves...

Exploring Religious Community Online is the first comprehensive study of the development and implications of online communities for religious groups. This book investigates religious community online by examining how Christian communities have adopted internet technologies, and looks at how these online practices pose new challenges to offline religious community and culture.

Uses of Blogs brings together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields to offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs. Blogging is rapidly developing into a mainstream activity for Internet users, but beyond the popular headlines, there has been very little serious research done on their actual application in specific, everyday contexts. One reason for this is that the variety of styles of blogging news blogs and political commentary blogs, marketing blogs, corporate dark blogs, fictional blogs, educational blogs, to name just a few make...

How do people have relationships when they are apart, or develop them when they ve never even met? From MySpace and weblogs to romance and sexuality, this book draws together a range of studies on -remote relationships-, investigating the intricate, intimate ways that people forge connections online. The term remote refers to the technologies that facilitate forms of communication, and also underlines the lack of physicality involved in these relationships, developed at a distance. Using empirical data, these collected essays explore a wide variety of relationships, examining the...

Should today s society be termed an -information- or a -network- society? This book provides an alternative choice the hypercomplex society, which is a critical, complex-theoretical understanding of society whose growing level of social complexity represents the basic challenge of our current society. This original understanding of society is presented through a historical analysis of the emergence of the current state of hypercomplexity and polycentrism. The functioning of communication, mass media, and the public sphere in the hypercomplex society is also analyzed and the Internet is...

Sex has shaped the Internet from the very beginning. In the process, the Internet has also brought about a plethora of new sexual possibilities, opened new markets for the entrepreneurs of pornography, challenged the boundaries of social institutions, exposed precarious moral dynamics, and created a novel arena for asking important questions about the people who may or may not be grounded in this emerging matrix of computer-mediated meaning. This book takes stock of these changes. Drawing from some of the most notable works written on the subject and original contributions from experts in the...

Bloggers around the world produce material for local, national and international audiences, yet they are developing in ways that are distinct from the U.S. model. Through case studies of blogs written in English, Chinese, Arab, French, Russian, and Hebrew, this book explores the way blogging is being conceptualized in different cultural contexts. The authors move beyond the most highly trafficked sites to shed light on larger developments taking place online, calling into question assumptions that form the foundation of much of what we read on blogging and, by extension, on global amateur or...

Thematically organized around three of the most pressing ethical issues of the digital age (shifting of professional norms, moderating offensive content, and privacy), this volume offers a window into some of the hot-button ethical issues facing a society where digital has become the new normal. Straddling an applied ethical and theoretical approach, the research represented not only reflects on how our ethical frameworks have been changed and challenged by digital technology, but also provides insights for those confronted with specific ethical dilemmas related to digital technology. With...

From race, sex, class, and culture, the multidisciplinary field of Internet studies needs theoretical and methodological approaches that allow us to question the organization of social relations that are embedded in digital technologies, and that foster a clearer understanding of how power relations are organized through technologies.
Representing a scholarly dialogue among established and emerging critical media and information studies scholars, this volume provides a means of foregrounding new questions, methods, and theories which can be applied to digital media, platforms, and...