Critical Perspectives on the Internet

Front Cover
Greg Elmer
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 - 217 pages
This critical reader of original essays places the boom and bust years of the Internet in a broad cultural context. Exploring the world of html, web browsers, cookies, online net guides, portals, and Internet service providers, this text includes the history of the Internet, interesting case studies and discussions on online community, user inequalities, and governance.

Within the larger issues of technological infrastructure, government policy, and globalization, Critical Perspectives on the Internet highlights both the limitations and possibilities of everyday Internet use. Does the net function as a space for radical social and political change? For challenging established media? What opportunities lie in the cracks and crevasses of net structure?

With its critical agenda for Internet studies, this text is a valuable tool for upper-level courses on the Internet, online communication, computer-mediated communication, communication and information technologies, and media and politics.

From inside the book

Contents

Disorganizing the New Technology
xi
A Critical History of the Internet
21
NET ARCHITECTURE
41
The Case of Web Browser Cookies EnablingDisabling Convenience and Relevance on the Web
43
Surfing for Knowledge in the Information Society
57
RETHINKING NET COMMUNITIES
81
The Myth of the Unmarked Net Speaker
83
Digitizing and Globalizing Indigenous Voices The Zapatista Movement
99
GLOBALIZATION AND GOVERNANCE
121
ECapital and the ManyHeaded Hydra
123
Convergence Policy Its Not What You Dance Its the Way You Dance It
159
Internet Globalization and the Political Economy of Infrastructure
177
Index
197
About the Contributors
209
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Greg Elmer is assistant professor of communication at Boston College.

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