Virtual Society?

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 Reseach 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.

... intelligent, well-grounded and carefully drawn insights into the take up and use of ICTs ... intriguing case studies ... Throughout, Woolgar's book provides concrete sociological evidence to justify the question mark in the title.

• 1. Introduction: Five Rules of Virtuality ; 2. They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualizing Use and Non-use of the Internet ; 3. Visualization Needs Vision: The Pre-paradigmatic Character of Virtual Reality ; 4. How Social is Internet Communication? A Reappraisal of Bandwidth and Anonymity Effects ; 5. New Public Places for Internet Access: Networks for Practice-Based Learning and Social Inclusion ; 6. Allegories of Creative Destruction: Technology and Organization in Narratives of the e-Economy ; 7. Confronting Electronic Surveillance: Desiring and Resisting New Technologies ; 8. Getting Real about Surveillance and Privacy at Work ; 9. Virtual Society and the Cultural Practice of Studey ; 10. The Reality of Virtual Social Support ; 11. Real and Virtual Connectivity: New Media in London ; 12. Presence, Absence, and Accountability: Email and the Mediation of Organizational Memory ; 13. Inside the Bubble: Communion, Cognition, and Deep Play at the Intersection of Wall Street and Cyberspace ; 14. The Day-to-Day Work of Standardization: A Sceptical Note on the Reliance on IT in a Retail Bank ; 15. Cotton to Computers: From Industrial to Information Revolutions ; 16. Mobile Society? Technology, Distance, and Presence ; 17. Abstraction and Decontextualization: An Anthropological Comment