Women & Everyday Uses of the Internet investigates the forms and codes of the Internet as a popular medium and the ways in which women figure as users, content producers, and target audiences. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, this book addresses issues of gendered identity and agency in the wider framework of consumer culture and uses of new media. Individual chapters explore personal and commercial web sites for women, constructions of lesbian identity, communities of female consumers and Vietnam veterans, women s web cam sites, educational experiences and information...

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.

Mobile phones and SMS (short message service), the Internet and email, are digital technologies that are transforming our ways of being together. Or are they? Cutting through the hype about how the Internet is revolutionizing the ways we relate to one another, Michele A. Willson offers a wide-ranging investigation of community in the digital age. Technically Together takes the reader on a thoughtful tour of the key writings on community and technology and the current debates that surround them to provide a clear understanding of the challenges new technologies present for theories of...

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...

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...

In 1996 the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began an Internet-based teaching program, allowing students across the United States and the world to earn a Master s degree from a distance. The program, known as LEEP (Library Education Experimental Project), has been an outstanding success, and as an early innovation in Internet use, provides important lessons on how to flourish in an online environment.
Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education brings together significant new research on online education,...