A wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the fast-changing world of cyberculture.

The only A-Z guide available on this subject, this book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the fast-changing and increasingly important world of cyberculture. Its clear and accessible entries cover aspects ranging from the technical to the theoretical, and from movies to the everyday, including: artificial intelligence cyberfeminism cyberpunk electronic government games HTML Java netiquette piracy. Fully cross-referenced and with suggestions for further reading, this comprehensive guide is an essential resource for anyone interested in this fascinating area.

A wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the fast-changing world of cyberculture.

Cyberculture Theorists is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to understand how to theorise cyberculture in all its forms. It surveys a ‘cluster’ of works that explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society.

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

This introduction to cybercultures provides a cutting-edge and much needed guide to the rapidly changing world of new media and communication. Considers cyberculture and new media through contemporary race, gender and sexuality studies and postcolonial theory Offers a clear analysis of some of the most complex issues in cybercultures, including identity, network societies, new geographies, and connectivity Includes discussions of gaming, social networking, geography, net-democracy, aesthetics, popular internet culture, the body, sexuality and politics Examines key questions in the political economy, racialization, gendering and governance of cyberculture

This impressive set provides a historical contextualization and up-to-date overview of 'cyberculture' – a term understood as the cultural perspective on new information and communications technologies. Presenting a comprehensive account of the evolution, current forms, uses and theories of cyberculture, it brings together a wide range of case studies and thought to create a unique, broad-based resource. Divided into four volumes, each with three sections, the collection maps out key thinking, and features landmark publications as well as cutting-edge interventions. Reflecting the past, present and future developments of cyberculture studies, the selection of articles included in this important work highlight the diversity of approaches, subjects and methods of inquiry involved in this fascinating area.