Virtual society? : technology, cyberbole, reality /

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Bibliographic Details
Imprint:	Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, ©2002.
Description:	1 online resource (xviii, 349 pages) : illustrations
Language:	English
Subject:	Information technology -- Social aspects. Internet -- Social aspects. Information technology -- Social aspects. Internet -- Social aspects. Electronic books.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11245422

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	Woolgar, Steve, editor.
ISBN:	9780191593963 0191593966 0199248753 9780199248759 0199248761 9780199248766
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 314-340) and index. Print version record.
Summary:	Almost all aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life stand to be affected by the new electronic technologies. Virtual Society? is one vision of the consequential impact of these technologies. But to what extent and in what ways are the Internet and other electronic technologies really changing our lives? To what extent are we moving to a 'virtual society'? This collection provides a comprehensive set of detailed empirical studies of the genesis and use of these new technologies, ranging widely across application areas: from cyber-cafés to new media; email and organizational memory: to surveillance-capable technologies in the workplace; virtual reality to CCTV in high-rise housing; stock exchange addicts to student study networks. It offers a unique perspective -- analytic scepticism -- for making sense of some surprisingly counterintuitive results, and for developing a refreshingly critical view of many taken-for-granted assumptions about the impact of the Internet on social relations and institutions. Each chapter presents a high quality exemplar of its own disciplinary perspective, addressed to a general social science audience. The diversity of disciplinary perspectives is brought to bear in a central message laid out in the opening discussion of the 'Five Rules of Virtuality', that with due reflexive caution and ironic sensitivity, general messages can be drawn from the observations of particular substantive contexts. In particular, claims that we are moving to a 'virtual society' need to be tempered by a reassessment of connections between what counts as 'real' and 'virtual'. --Publisher description.
Other form:	Print version: Virtual society? Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, ©2002 0199248753

Table of Contents:

Five rules of virtuality / Steve Woolgar
They came, they surfed, they went back to the beach : conceptualizing use and non-use of the Internet / Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas, and Tiziana Terranova
Visualization needs vision : the pre-paradigmatic character of virtual reality / G.M. Peter Swann and Tim P. Watts
How social is Internet communication? A reappraisal of bandwidth and anonymity effects / Susan E. Watt, Martin Lea, and Russell Spears
New public places for Internet access : networks for practice-based learning and social inclusion / Sonia Liff, Fred Steward, and Peter Watts
Allegories of creative destruction : technology and organization in narratives of the e-economy / David Knights [and others]
Confronting electronic surveillance : desiring and resisting new technologies / Brian A. McGrail
Getting real about surveillance and privacy at work / David Mason [and others]
Virtual society and the cultural practice of study / Charles Crook and Paul Light
The reality of virtual social support / Sarah Nettleton [and others]
Real and virtual connectivity : new media in London
Andreas Wittel, Celia Lury, and Scott Lash
Presence, absence, and accountability : e-mail and the mediation of organizational memory / Steven D. Brown and Geoffrey Lightfoot
Inside the bubble : communion, cognition, and deep play at the intersection of Wall Street and cyberspace / Melvin Pollner
The day-to-day work of standardization : a sceptical note on the reliance on IT in a retail bank / John A. Hughes, Mark Rouncefield, and Pete Tolmie
Cotton to computers : from industrial to information revolutions / Jon Agar, Sarah Green, and Penny Harvey
Mobile society? Technology, distance, and presence / Geoff Cooper [and others]
Abstraction and decontextualization : an anthropological comment / Marilyn Strathern.

Virtual society? : technology, cyberbole, reality /

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