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...

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...

The media alters one s experience of the world and, in turn, alters one s relationship to others. This is true of both the book and the screen, but with profoundly different consequences. The omnipresent screen of the early twenty-first century serves as a portal that reconfigures private and public experience in ways that are fundamentally different from print culture. Not only does the screen reveal the complexities of people and places beyond our reach, it alters our phenomenological awareness of space, sound, and motion. The individual experiences the altered duration of the screen, and...

In this groundbreaking book, media and time theorist Robert Hassan looks at the effects of the nexus between neoliberal globalization and the information technology revolution upon the production and dissemination of knowledge in technologically advanced societies. This nexus has created what Hassan calls an -information ecology-, an environment that affects the individual, culture and society in the same dialectical ways as the natural and built environment. Significantly, this information ecology generates its own temporality, that of -network time-, a digitally compressed and accelerated...

What is the nature of computer games, and what happens when we play them? This book describes human play as a semiotic process and computer game play as a fundamental act of human cognition, or -semiosis-. Offering one of the first fully articulated theories of computer games based on game play rather than game texts, The Nature of Computer Games mounts a serious challenge to literary critics, cultural theorists, and others who might assume computer game play is best understood with reference to preexisting social contexts. David Myers argues that computer game play displays a...