Virtual Society?

Technology, Cyberbole, Reality

Häftad, Engelska, 2002

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Beskrivning

Almost all aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life stand to be affected by the new electronic technologies. Virtual Society? is one vision of the consequential impact of these technologies. But to what extent and in what ways are the Internet and other electronic technologies really changing our lives? To what extent are we moving to a 'virtual society'? This collection provides a comprehensive set of detailed empirical studies of the genesis and use of these new technologies, ranging widely across application areas: from cyber-cafés to new media; email and organizational memory: to surveillance-capable technologies in the workplace; virtual reality to CCTV in high-rise housing; stock exchange addicts to student study networks. It offers a unique perspective - analytic scepticism - for making sense of some surprisingly counterintuitive results, and for developing a refreshingly critical view of many taken-for-granted assumptions about the impact of the Internet on social relations and institutions. Each chapter presents a high quality exemplar of its own disciplinary perspective, addressed to a general social science audience. The diversity of disciplinary perspectives is brought to bear in a central message laid out in the opening discussion of the 'Five Rules of Virtuality', that with due reflexive caution and ironic sensitivity, general messages can be drawn from the observations of particular substantive contexts. In particular, claims that we are moving to a 'virtual society' need to be tempered by a reassessment of connections between what counts as 'real' and 'virtual'.This book will appeal to students and researchers in a very wide range of disciplines, both within and beyond the social sciences and management, and to all practitioners struggling with the realities of the new virtual technologies

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2002-09-26
Mått:157 x 234 x 19 mm
Vikt:516 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:368
Förlag:OUP OXFORD
ISBN:9780199248766

Utforska kategorier

Informationsteknik: allmänt inom Data och IT
Affärsstrategi inom Ekonomi och Ledarskap
Systemvetenskap och AI inom Data och IT

Mer om författaren

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.

Recensioner i media

... 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.

Innehållsförteckning

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 Study ; 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