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September 14, 2004
The Cybercultures Reader
| Title | The Cybercultures Reader |  |
| Author | David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (editors) | |
| Publisher | Routledge, London & New York | |
| Date | 2001 (reprint; first published 2000) | |
| ISBN | 0-415-18379-0 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| Where is cyberspace, and why would we want to go there? Over 700 pages and more than 50 authors address the vexed questions of ‘cyberculture’ and ‘cyborg’ identity in this collection, with essays organised into theme sections: popular cybercultures, cyber subcultures, cyberfeminism, cybersexual, and so on. The book as a whole has a premillennial tone, with many texts from the mid-90s, or even earlier; as a collection of classic commentaries alone (including Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Timothy Leary’s The Cyberpunk, and many others), it deserves a place on any (cyber) bookshelf. The diverse treatments locate technology in the tradition of Western (and, very occasionally, non-Western), thought — from the Edenic myth and Euclidian geometry to colonialization, Wild West archetypes and road rage — as they attempt to make sense of one of our most compelling modern metaphors. Definitions of cyberspace vary widely, from William Gibson’s "infinite cage," through Timothy Leary’s perception of it as an electronic form of LSD, to Kevin Robins’ view of it as a kind of wish-fulfilment delusion embodying our desire, "to sustain the infantile experience of power and infinite possibility." The multiplicity of standpoints, ranging from hardened scepticism to breathless gee-whizzery, only serve to emphasize the nebulous nature of what we so all-embracingly call "cyberspace" (the very term coined in a work of fiction by a novelist, William Gibson again, in 1984). That the last word goes to Ziauddin Sardars seems prophetic now, in the light of the events of September 2001. His essay, Alt.civililizations.faq, is a compelling account of the mythic cyber realm as the dark side of the West, its "latest conquest, the new domain that it has colonized." A cheap alternative to space exploration, cyberspace is our new frontier, "the American dream writ large," and "an instrument for distracting Western society from its increasing spiritual poverty, utter meaninglessness and grinding misery and inhumanity of everyday lives". With his account at least, it seems our conceptions of cyberspace are escaping fiction, relocating into real-world history, and generally coming of age. | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM