Cultures of the Internet

This collection of articles brings together many writers on the Net and Cyberspace in one volume. This volume examines the arrival of E-mail and online discussion groups, and considers the prospects for an "online world" - a playground for virtual bodies in which identities are flexible, swappable and disconnected from real-world bodies. The book: systematically describes the development of the Internet, including its history in the military-industrial complex, and the role of state policies leading, for example, to the creation of Minitel and the building of information superhighways; traces the rise of virtual conviviality and how it appears about to replace physical encounters between actors in public places, which will become the sole preserve of the homeless; and explores the development of this technology as a commercialized leisure form and a forum for underground political organization and critique.