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Virtual Politics
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Virtual Politics
Identity and Community in Cyberspace

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February 1998 | 256 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Virtual Politics is a critical overview of the newùdigitalùbody politic, with new technologies framing the discussion of key themes in social theory. This book shows how these new technologies are altering the nature of identity and agency, the relation of self to other, and the structure of community and political representation. The principal theme of Virtual Politics is that electronically and digitally simulated environments offer an important metaphor for understanding social relations. This volume focuses on how virtual realities effectively extend space, time, and the body, showing how technologies such as the automobile and environments such as the movie theater and the shopping mall prefigure cyberspace. It also examines the loss of political identity and agency in cyberspace and identifies a disembodied consumer in anonymous control of a simulated reality. Virtual Politics will be required reading for students of sociology, social theory, and cultural studies.

 
Introduction
 
PART ONE: THE SELF, IDENTITY AND BODY IN THE AGE OF THE VIRTUAL
David Holmes
Virtual Identity
Communities of Broadcast, Communities of Interactivity

 
Cathryn Vasseleu
Virtual Worlds/Virtual Bodies
Nicola Green
Beyond Being Digital
The Semiotics of Technics

 
Chris Chesher
An Ontology of Digital Domains
Simon Cooper
The Subject of Virtual Reality
Plenitude vs Alienation

 
Paul James and Freya Carkeek
This Abstract Body
 
PART TWO: POLITICS AND COMMUNITY IN VIRTUAL WORLDS
Virtual Urban Futures

Michael Ostwald
Michele Willson
Community in the Abstract
A Political and Ethical Dilemma?

 
Mark Nunes
What Space Is Cyberspace?
The Internet and Virtuality

 
Patricia Wise
Always Already Virtual
Feminist Politics in Cyberspace

 
Chris Zigiuras
Virtual Reality and the New Age
The Technologisation of the Sacred

 
Mark Poster
Cyberdemocracy
Internet and the Public Sphere

 

`Contains valuable insights for scholars teaching and researching in this field' - Political Science

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Hardcover
ISBN: 9780761956099
$280.00

Paperback
ISBN: 9780761956105
$79.00