Virtual Society?

Technology, Cyberbole, Reality
Erscheinungsjahr 2002
ISBN: 978-0-19-924876-6
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 559 g

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

Autoren/Hrsg.

Woolgar, Steve

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technologie: Soziale & Ethische Aspekte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein Soziale und ethische Aspekte der EDV
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Digital Lifestyle Internet, E-Mail, Social Media
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: Steve Woolgar: Introduction: Five Rules of Virtuality

- 2: Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas, and Tiziana Terranova: They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualizing Use and Non-use of the Internet

- 3: G. M. Peter Swann and Tim P. Watts: Visualization Needs Vision: The Pre-paradigmatic Character of Virtual Reality

- 4: Susan E. Watt, Martin Lea, and Russell Spears: How Social is Internet Communication? A Reappraisal of Bandwidth and Anonymity Effects

- 5: Sonia Liff, Fred Steward, and Peter Watts: New Public Places for Internet Access: Networks for Practice-Based Learning and Social Inclusion

- 6: David Knights, Faith Noble, Theo Vurdubakis, and Hugh Willmott: Allegories of Creative Destruction: Technology and Organization in Narratives of the e-Economy

- 7: Brian McGrail: Confronting Electronic Surveillance: Desiring and Resisting New Technologies

- 8: David Mason, Graham Button, Gloria Lankshear, and Sally Coates: Getting Real about Surveillance and Privacy at Work

- 9: Charles Crook and Paul Light: Virtual Society and the Cultural Practice of Study

- 10: Sarah Nettleton, Nicholas Pleace, Roger Burrows, Steven Muncer, and Brian Loader: The Reality of Virtual Social Support

- 11: Andreas Wittel, Celia Lury, and Scott Lash: Real and Virtual Connectivity: New Media in London

- 12: Steven D. Brown and Geoffrey Lightfoot: Presence, Absence, and Accountability: Email and the Mediation of Organizational Memory

- 13: Melvin Pollner: Inside the Bubble: Communion, Cognition, and Deep Play at the Intersection of Wall Street and Cyberspace

- 14: John Hughes, Mark Rouncefield, and Pete Tolmie: The Day-to-Day Work of Standardization: A Sceptical Note on the Reliance on IT in a Retail Bank

- 15: Jon Agar, Sarah Green, and Penny Harvey: Cotton to Computers: From Industrial to Information Revolutions

- 16: Geoff Cooper, Nicola Green, Richard Harper, and Gerald Murtagh: Mobile Society? Technology, Distance, and Presence

- 17: Marilyn Strathern: Abstraction and Decontextualization: An Anthropological Comment

Über Autor(innen)

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.