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bodies
This page
points to writing about bodies, identity and communication in the digital environment.
corporeality and communication
That heading is, we hope, our last
genuflection to the arid end of the sociology of the web, so if you've
got this far don't despair.
A famous New Yorker cartoon explains
that 'on the web no one knows that you're a dog', although in
practice it either doesn't matter or you can suss out the essential
characteristics of who's on the other end of the network. My Tiny
Life: Crime & Passion In A Virtual World (London, 4th Estate 99)
by Julian Dibbell is a somewhat self-indulgent account of name calling
and role playing among the MUD and MOO aficionados.
We were tempted to
suggest that the participants turned off their machines, spurned the
double decaf soy macchiato and got a life ... but part of the charm of
the net is its opportunities for cultural diversity. Laura Gurak's
Privacy & Persuasion in Cyberspace (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 97)
offers another perspective on that world and also reproduces the
cartoon.
We've noted Patricia Wallace's The Psychology of
the Internet (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 99) and Connections
(Cambridge, MIT Press 92) by Lee
Sproull & Sara Kiesler. Essays
in Intermedia: Interpersonal Communication in a Media
World
(New
York, Oxford Uni Press
86)
edited by Gary Gumpert & Robert Cathcart are also of interest.
Network & Netplay: Virtual Groups On
The Internet (Cambridge, MIT Press 98) is a valuable collection of
essays edited by Fay Sudweeks. Lynn Cherny's Conversation &
Community: Chat in A Virtual World (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press
99) is a major sociological study. Rob Shields edited Cultures of
Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies (London,
SAGE 96), more postgrad seminar fodder.
CTheory,
an online journal edited by Arthur Kroker, will beam you up to the high
end of postmodern communication theory. Remember to take your own oxygen
supply before you go: the air up there is thin and stuffy on occasion. Our
news profile includes a detailed set
of pointers to cyberstudies journals.
Jayne Gackenbach edited the comprehensive Psychology
& the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal &
Transpersonal Implications (San Diego, Academic Press
99), a major primer for behavioural scientists. Joshua
Meyrowitz' No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on
Social Behaviour (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 86) is a more general
study.
gender and sexuality
Much of the writing about gender online
is disappointingly thin, overly polemical or postgrad chatter. As with studies of class,
the most valuable insights are often buried within larger works.
We're underwhelmed by Dale Spender's Nattering on the Net:
Women, Power & Cyberspace (Sydney, Spinifex 96). Sadie
Plant's Zeros & Ones: Digital Women & the New Technoculture
(London, Routledge 97) is less jolly, perhaps more incisive.
Among the extensive literature on
online gender bending High Noon on the Electronic Frontier:
Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge, MIT Press 96) edited
by Peter Ludlow has thoughtful essays, while Dibbell's My Tiny Life
centres on digital transgender and transgression.
Allucquere
Rosanne Stone's The War of Desire & Technology at the Close of
the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MIT Press 95)
is a wild ride through postmodernism, complete with chapters on 'Sex,
Death & Machinery: How I Fell In Love With My Prosthesis' and 'Cyberdaemmerung
At The Atari Lab'.
Jenny Wolmark's Cybersexualities (Edinburgh,
Edinburgh Uni Press 99) is one of the better studies of
'virtual eros'.
identity
Questions of anonymity and identity are
explored in the privacy, censorship and security guides on this site.
cyborgs
Having shed gender or identity as a
Gutenberg artefact, why not get rid of your body?
Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature & Informatics (Chicago, Uni of Chicago
Press 99) explores
theoretical hypotheses about the
total transformation of the human body that occurs through its
interpolation in the nascent information networks. At successive
moments in their development, digital media have contributed to the
destabilization of an established sense of "reality." But,
at the same time, these new media are used to simulate signifying
objects, the bodies and the worlds they are rendering obsolete ... an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness from presence/absence. This
shift affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a
change in the body (the material substrate) and as a change in the
message (the codes of representation).
Much of Donna Haraway's cyberfeminist Simians,
Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, Routledge
91) strikes us as merely silly. There are pointers to similar studies on
the site of the US Resource Center for Cyberculture
Studies (RCCS). There's
more bite in Claudia Springer's Electronic Eros, Bodies & Desire
in the Postindustrial Age (Austin, Uni of Texas Press 96).
The Cyborg Handbook (London, Routledge 96) is a weighty
collection of theorizing and fiction edited by Chris Gray, Heidi
Figueroa-Sarriera & Steven Mentor. Just the thing to read while you
wait at the cryogenics facility.
If you're interested in "Posthumanism in the Age of Pancapitalism"
- the cyborg and downloaded virtual consciousness - you can explore the Extropy
Institute, replete with statements such as
Humanity is a temporary stage along
the evolutionary pathway. We are not the zenith of nature's
development. It is time for us to consciously take charge of ourselves
and to accelerate our transhuman progress. No more gods, no more
faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms,
our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to
posthumanity.
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