This book examines the interrelationship between telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental in the production of homogenous world-spaces, and how htese, in turn, presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity.
Virtual Geographies explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature: * investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed * offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies * explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world. This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.
Arvustused
'This is an interesting collection of essays with much to recommend it.' - Progress in Human Geography
List of illustrations vii List of contributors viii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1(20) Mike Crang Phil Crang Jon May PART I Embedding the virtual 21(86) Toward the light `within: optical technologies, spatial metaphors and changing subjectivities 23(21) Ken Hillis The telephone: its social shaping and public negotiation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London 44(19) Jeremy Stein Consumers or workers?: restructuring telecommunications in Aotearoa/New Zealand 63(16) Wendy Larner Transnationalism, technoscience and difference: the analysis of material--semiotic practices 79(13) Laura Chernaik The convergence of virtual and actual in the Global Matrix: artificial life, geo-economics and psychogeography 92(15) Otto Imken PART II Cyberscapes 107(96) From city space to cyberspace 109(22) Jennifer S. Light Geographies of surveillant simulation 131(18) Stephen Graham Rural telematics: The Information Society and rural development 149(15) Christopher Ray Hilary Talbot Internauts and guerrilleros: the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico and its extension into cyberspace 164(14) Oliver Froehling Gender and the landscapes of computing in an Internet cafe 178(25) Nina Wakeford PART III Thinking and writing the virtual 203(81) The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibsons cyberspace 205(17) James Kneale On boundfulness: the space of hypertext bodies 222(22) Michael Joyce Unthinkable complexity? Cyberspace otherwise 244(17) Nick Bingham Virtual worlds: simulation, suppletion, s(ed)uction and simulacra 261(23) Marcus A. Doel David B. Clarke References 284(31) Index 315
Mike Crang, Phil Crang, Jon May
