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The Internet is here but have we caught up with all the implications for culture and everyday life? This collection of original articles on the development of computer-mediated communications brings together many of the most accomplished writers on the Net and cyberspace.
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. The book traces the rise of virtual conviviality and how it supplements the physical encounters between actors in public spaces that are abandoned to the homeless.
The book is distinguished by a critical and social tone. It presents systematic descriptions of the development of the Internet, its history in the military-industrial complex, the role of state policies leading, for example, to the creation of Minitel, and the building of information `superhighways'. It also explores the development of this technology as a commercialized leisure form and a forum for underground political organization and critique.
List of contents
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
About the author
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
University of Teesside
Andre Lemos
Universite Paris V
Summary
'Interrogated in well-researched case studies... 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
Report
'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
