This collection of articles brings together many writers on the Net and Cyberspace in one volume. This volume examines the arrival of E-mail and online discussion groups, and considers the prospects for an "online world" - a playground for virtual bodies in which identities are flexible, swappable and disconnected from real-world bodies. The book: systematically describes the development of the Internet, including its history in the military-industrial complex, and the role of state policies leading, for example, to the creation of Minitel and the building of information superhighways; traces the rise of virtual conviviality and how it appears about to replace physical encounters between actors in public places, which will become the sole preserve of the homeless; and explores the development of this technology as a commercialized leisure form and a forum for underground political organization and critique.
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 UniversitySadie Plant University of BirminghamMike Featherstone Goldsmiths, UKAndre Lemos Universite Paris V
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
'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
