How can we interpret cyberspace? What is the place of the embodied human agent in the virtual world? This innovative collection examines the emerging arena of cyberspace and the challenges it presents for the social and cultural forms of the human body. It shows how changing relations between body and technology offer new arenas for cultural representations. At the same time, the contributors examine the realities of human embodiment and the limits of virtual worlds. Topics examined include: technological body modifications, replacements and prosthetics; bodies in cyberspace, virtual environments and cyborg culture; cultural representations of technological embodiment in visual and literary productions; and cyberpunk science fiction as a pre-figurative social and cultural theory.

Cyberspace and cybertechnology have impacted on every aspect of our lives. Western society, culture, politics and economics are now all intricately bound with cyberspace. Living With Cyberspace brings together the leading cyber-theorists of North America, Britain and Australia to map the present and the future of cyberspace.Presenting a guidebook to our new world, both the theory and the practice, the book covers subjects as diverse as androids, biotech, electronic commerce, the acceleration of everyday life, access to information, the alliance between the military and the entertainment industries, feminism, democratic practice and human consciousness itself.Together, the essays--divided into separately introduced sections on society , culture, politics and economics--present a systematic and state-of-the-art overview of technology and society in the 21st Century.Contributors: John Armitage, Verena Andermatt Conley, James Der Derian, William H. Dutton, Phil Graham, Tim Jordan, Wan-Ying Ling, David Lyon, Ian Miles, Joanne Roberts, Saskia Sassen, Cathryn Vasseleu, McKenzie Wark, Frank Webster.

Setting out a history of cyberspace and its relationship with the discipline that was to become digital humanities, this book is an account of an often-forgotten period of internet history in the 1990s when this medium was in its infancy. It provides a detailed account of the concepts of 'cyberspace' and the 'virtual', which were characteristic of a perception that using the internet allowed users to enter a separate space from everyday life- a world elsewhere. In doing so, it argues that this libertarian idea of the internet framed it as a new frontier, where the rules of the everyday world did not and should not apply, and where the individual could find freedom. These early norms and the regrettable lack of regulation that was a consequence of them, this book argues, contributed to many of current issues with internet media. including of toxic communication, disinformation and over-commercialisation

This book examines the interrelationship between telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental in the production of homogenous world-spaces, and how these, in turn, presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity. This work will be of essential interest to scholars and students in the fields of sociology, geography, cultural studies and media studies.

Virtual texts have emerged within the realm of the Internet as the predominant means of global communication. As both technological and cultural artifacts, they embody and challenge cultural assumptions and invite new ways of conceptualizing knowledge, community, identity, and meaning. But despite the pervasiveness of the Internet in nearly all aspects of contemporary life, no single resource has cataloged the ways in which numerous disciplines have investigated and critiqued virtual texts. This bibliography includes more than 1500 annotated entries for books, articles, dissertations, and electronic resources on virtual texts published between 1988 and 1999. Because of the multiple contexts in which virtual texts are studied, the bibliography addresses virtual communication across a broad range of disciplines and philosophies. It encompasses studies of the historical development of virtual texts; investigations of the many interdisciplinary applications of virtual texts and discussions of such legal issues as privacy and intellectual property. Entries are arranged alphabetically within topical chapters, and extensive indexes facilitate easy access.

Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the gendered and socio-culturally constructed phenomenon of our everyday engagement with media. The book is particularly concerned with issues of agency and power, identifying strong correlations between perceptions of gaming and actual gaming practices, as well as the reinforcement, through gaming, of established (gendered, sexed, and classed) power relationships within households. As such, it reveals the manner in which existing relations re-emerge through engagement with new technology. Offering an empirically grounded understanding of what goes on when we mediate technology and media in our everyday lives Ethnographies of the Videogame is more than a timely intervention into game studies. It provides pertinent and reflexive commentary on the relationship between text and audience, highlighting the relationships of gender and power in gaming practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in media and new media, gender and class, and the sociology of leisure.