Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies

Front Cover
Professor Robert M Shields, Rob Shields
SAGE, 1996 M02 22 - 208 pages
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.

 

Contents

The Labyrinth of Minitel
33
The Coming of Cybereality in Jamaica
49
The Technologies of Virtual Reality
70
The Coming of Cyberspacetime and the End of the Polity
99
Are MUDs Communities? Identity Belonging
117
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