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Virtual Society?- technology, cyberbole, reality
Edited by Steve Woolgar (Oxford University Press, 2002)
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? Are fundamental shifts and significant changes taking
place? 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 cybercafes to new media; email and organisational
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 new 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 on 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”.
This book will appeal to students and researchers in a very wide range of
disciplines, both within and beyond the social sciences and management, and
to all practitioners struggling with the realities of the new virtual
technologies.
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