Description
The internet has grown in recent years from a fringe cultural phenomenon to a significant site of cultural production and transformation. "Internet Culture" maps the contours of this new domain of language, politics and identity, locating it within the interconnected histories of communication and the public sphere. Neither a user's guide to the Net nor a futuristic manifesto, "Internet Culture" offers instead a critical interrogation of the sustaining myths of the virtual world and of the implications of the current mass migration onto the electronic frontier. Among the topics discussed in "Internet Culture" are the virtual spaces and places created by the citizens of the Net, and crucially, their claims to the hotly contested notion of "virtual community"; the virtual bodies that occupy such spaces; and the desires (whether for pleasure or transcendence) that animate these bodies. The contributors also examine the communication medium behind the worlds of the Net, analyzing the rhetorical conventions governing online discussion, literary antecedents, and potential pedagogical applications. The book concludes by looking at the dynamics of power that have shaped the spaces of public discourse; in a new medium that prides itself on its democratizing tendancies, it is especially important to cast a critical eye on the social and political assumptions that sustain it.
