Internet Culture

The internet has recently grown from a fringe cultural phenomenon to a significant site of cultural production and transformation. Internet Culture maps this new domain of language, politics and identity, locating it within the histories of communication and the public sphere. Internet Culture offers a critical interrogation of the sustaining myths of the virtual world and of the implications of the current mass migration onto the electronic frontier. Among the topics discussed in Internet Culture are the virtual spaces and places created by the citizens of the Net and their claims to the hotly contested notion of "virtual community"; the virtual bodies that occupy such spaces; and the desires that animate these bodies. The contributors also examine the communication medium behind theworlds of the Net, analyzing the rhetorical conventions governing online discussion, literary antecedents,and potential pedagogical applications.

David Porter teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the editor of Between Men and Feminism,also published by Routledge.

Part 1 Virtual Communities; Chapter 1 An Archaeology of Cyberspaces, Shawn P. Wilbur; Chapter 2 Community and Identity in the Electronic Village, Derek Foster; Chapter 3 Usenet Communities and the Cultural Politics of Information, MicheleTepper; Chapter 4 Cyberspace and Place, Dave Healy; Part 2 Virtual Bodies; Chapter 5 Flesh Made Word, Shannon McRae; Chapter 6 Virtually Embodied, Mizuko Ito; Chapter 7 The Postmodern Paradiso, Jeffrey Fisher; Part 3 Language, Writing, Rhetoric; Chapter 8 Spam, Charles J. Stivale; Chapter 9 I Flamed Freud, William B. Millard; Chapter 10 IMHO, Brian A. Connery; Chapter 11 Essayistic Messages, James A. Knapp; Part 4 Politics and the Public Sphere; Chapter 12 Cyberdemocracy Internet and the Public Sphere, Mark Poster; Chapter 13 Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism and the Myth of Virtual Community, Joseph Lockard; Chapter 14 Reading, Writing, Hypertext Democratic Politics in the Virtual Classroom, Joseph Tabbi; Chapter 15 Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture, Jon Stratton;