Virtual Society? Get Real!: Technology, Cyberbole, Reality

by Steve Woolgar

Overview

This book investigates the precise effects on society of the new and much vaunted electronic technologies (ICTs). All aspects of our social, cultural, economic, and political life stand to be affected by their continued massive growth, but are fundamental shifts already taking place in the way in which we behave, organize, and interact as a direct result of the new technologies? The contributors to the volume argue that their transformative effects amount to our transition to a virtual society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199248766
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/06/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	9.56(w) x 6.26(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Steve Woolgar was Professor of Sociology, Head of the Department of Human Sciences, and Director of CRICT (Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology) until 2000. He has held visiting appointments at McGill University, MIT, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, Paris, and University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship, and the winner of an ESRC Senior Research Fellowship. He moved to the University of Oxford in autumn 2000 to take up the Chair of Marketing at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is currently Director of the ESRC' Virtual Society?' programme.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Five Rules of Virtuality, Steve Woolgar2. They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualizing Use and Non-use of the Internet, Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas, and Tiziana Terranova3. Visualization Needs Vision: The Pre-paradigmatic Character of Virtual Reality, G. M. Peter Swann and Tim P. Watts4. How Social is Internet Communication? A Reappraisal of Bandwidth and Anonymity Effects, Susan E. Watt, Martin Lea, and Russell Spears5. New Public Places for Internet Access: Networks for Practice-Based Learning and Social Inclusion, Sonia Liff, Fred Steward, and Peter Watts6. Allegories of Creative Destruction: Technology and Organization in Narratives of the e-Economy, David Knights, Faith Noble, Theo Vurdubakis, and Hugh Willmott7. Confronting Electronic Surveillance: Desiring and Resisting New Technologies, Brian McGrail8. Getting Real about Surveillance and Privacy at Work, David Mason, Graham Button, Gloria Lankshear, Sally Coates, and Wes Sharrock9. Virtual Society and the Cultural Practice of Studey, Charles Crook and Paul Light10. The Reality of Virtual Social Support, Sarah Nettleton, Nicholas Pleace, Roger Burrows, Steven Muncer, and Brian Loader11. Real and Virtual Connectivity: New Media in London, Andreas Wittel, Celia Lury, and Scott Lash12. Presence, Absence, and Accountability: Email and the Mediation of Organizational Memory, Steven D. Brown and Geoffrey Lightfoot13. Inside the Bubble: Communion, Cognition, and Deep Play at the Intersection of Wall Street and Cyberspace, Melvin Pollner14. The Day-to-Day Work of Standardization: A Sceptical Note on the Reliance on IT in a Retail Bank, John Hughes, Mark Rouncefield, and Pete Tolmie15. Cotton to Computers: From Industrial to Information Revolutions, Jon Agar, Sarah Green, and Penny Harvey16. Mobile Society? Technology, Distance, and Presence, Geoff Cooper, Nicola Green, Richard Harper, and Gerald Murtagh17. Abstraction and Decontextualization: An Anthropological Comment, Marilyn Strathern