Virtual Society? - Technology, Cyberbole, Reality

Zusatztext This book shows the essential contribution of social sciences to the understanding of the network society, our society. Based on scholarly research, it provides a rigorous account of the diverse effects of information and communication technologies on the social fabric of our lives. It is a great antidote against mythologies and media hype on this critical subject matter. Informationen zum Autor Steve Woolgar was Professor of Sociology, Head of the Department of Human Sciences, and Director of CRICT (Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology) until 2000. He has held visiting appointments at McGill University, MIT, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, Paris, and University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship, and the winner of an ESRC Senior Reseach Fellowship. He moved to the University of Oxford in autumn 2000 to take up the Chair of Marketing at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is currently Director of the ESRC' Virtual Society?' programme. Klappentext This book investigates the precise effects on society of the new and much vaunted electronic technologies (ICTs). All aspects of our social! cultural! economic! and political life stand to be affected by their continued massive growth! but are fundamental shifts already taking place in the way in which we behave! organize! and interact as a direct result of the new technologies? The contributors to the volume argue that their transformative effects amount to our transition to a virtual society. Zusammenfassung Almost all aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life stand to be affected by the new electronic technologies. Virtual Society? is one vision of the consequential impact of these technologies. But to what extent and in what ways are the Internet and other electronic technologies really changing our lives? To what extent are we moving to a 'virtual society'? This collection provides a comprehensive set of detailed empirical studies of the genesis and use of these new technologies, ranging widely across application areas: from cyber-cafés to new media; email and organizational memory: to surveillance-capable technologies in the workplace; virtual reality to CCTV in high-rise housing; stock exchange addicts to student study networks. It offers a unique perspective - analytic scepticism - for making sense of some surprisingly counterintuitive results, and for developing a refreshingly critical view of many taken-for-granted assumptions about the impact of the Internet on social relations and institutions. Each chapter presents a high quality exemplar of its own disciplinary perspective, addressed to a general social science audience. The diversity of disciplinary perspectives is brought to bear in a central message laid out in the opening discussion of the 'Five Rules of Virtuality', that with due reflexive caution and ironic sensitivity, general messages can be drawn from the observations of particular substantive contexts. In particular, claims that we are moving to a 'virtual society' need to be tempered by a reassessment of connections between what counts as 'real' and 'virtual'.This book will appeal to students and researchers in a very wide range of disciplines, both within and beyond the social sciences and management, and to all practitioners struggling with the realities of the new virtual technologies Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Steve Woolgar: Introduction: Five Rules of Virtuality 2: Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas, and Tiziana Terranova: They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualizing Use and Non-use of the Internet 3: G. M. Peter Swann and Tim P. Watts: Visualization Needs Vision: The Pre-paradigmatic Character of Virtual Reality 4: Susan E. Watt, Martin Lea, and Russell Spears: How Social is Internet Communication? A Reappraisal of Bandwidth and ...

Product details

• Authors: Steve Woolgar, Steve (Chair of Marketing Woolgar
• Assisted by: Steve Woolgar (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.09.2002
• EAN: 9780199248766
• ISBN: 978-0-19-924876-6
• No. of pages: 368
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general)