192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    First Published in 2001. In this collection of essays and interviews, Mark Poster examines theoretical approaches and develops his own position on our information based society. He contends that new communications media disrupt and transfigure the way identities are constituted in cultural exchanges. He looks in detail at several aspects of what might be called "internet culture", including virtuality and democracy.
    Poster advocates an awareness of the Internet and other new forms of communication, calling for a mobilization to ensure accessibility to all and to configure technology into vehicles of open cultural creation. For example, nothing is pure about the Internet politically, he points out, and it remains an open question as to who will transform the potentiality of new communications media into determinate cultural configurations. This book explores the rupture and potentiality between the electronic self and the face-to-face self inherent in new forms of technology and media.

    Chapter 1 Words without things, Mark Poster; Chapter 2 Foucault, poststructuralism, and the mode of information, Mark Poster; Chapter 3 Social theory and the new media, Mark Poster; Chapter 4 Postmodern virtualities, Mark Poster; Chapter 5 Cyber democracy: the internet and the public sphere, Mark Poster; Chapter 6 Theorizing virtual reality: baudrillard and derrida, Mark Poster; Chapter 7 Community, new media, posthumanism: an interview with mark poster; Chapter 8 Communication and the constitution of the self: an interview with mark poster, 14.8.1995; Commentary, Stanley Aronowitz;

    Biography

    Mark Poster, University of California at Irvine, USA and Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York Graduate Center, USA