Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations

by Mike Crang (Editor), Phil Crang (Editor), Jon May (Editor)

Overview

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 htese, in turn, presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity.

Virtual Geographies explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature:
* investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed
* offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies
* explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world. This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415168274
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Series:	Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

Mike Crang, Phil Crang, Jon May

Table of Contents

1 Introduction PART I Embedding the virtual 2 Toward the light ‘within’: optical technologies, spatial metaphors and changing subjectivities 3 The telephone: its social shaping and public negotiation in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century London 4 Consumers or workers?: restructuring telecommunications in Aotearoa/New Zealand 5 Transnationalism, technoscience and difference: the analysis of material-semiotic practices 6 The convergence of virtual and actual in the Global Matrix: artificial life, geo-economics and psychogeography PART II Cyberscapes 7 From city space to cyberspace 8 Geographies of surveillant simulation 9 Rural telematics: The Information Society and rural development 10 Internauts and guerrilleros: the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico and its extension into cyberspace 11 Gender and the landscapes of computing in an Internet café PART III Thinking and writing the virtual 12 The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibson’s cyberspace 13 On boundfulness: the space of hypertext bodies 14 Unthinkable complexity? Cyberspace otherwise 15 Virtual worlds: simulation, suppletion, s(ed)uction and simulacra

Editorial Reviews

'This is an interesting collection of essays with much to recommend it.' - Progress in Human Geography

From the Publisher

Explores the possibilities and dangers of the recent revolution in communication technologies. Outlining how these technologies are used to produce new virtual geographies and new types of space, the book's contributors attempt to demystify cyberspace and reveal how new communication technologies can open up new vistas. The anthology's 16 essayists<-->from geography, sociology, English, and philosophy<-->investigate such topics as the influence of literature and gender, and the rhetoric of online interaction. All essays are unified by several approaches to cyberspace: eschewal of simple technodeterminism, remembrance of already existing virtual geographies, and exploration of a variety of new virtual geographies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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