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What's the Matter with the Internet?
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by Mark Poster
University of Minnesota Press
Due/Published
May 2001, 232 pages,
paper
ISBN
0816638357
Poster offers an assessment of the potential the Internet has to redefine culture and politics. He details what truly distinguishes the Internet from other media and the implications these novel properties have for such vital issues as authorship, national identity and global citizenship, the fate of ethnicity and race, and democracy. Arguing that the Internet demands a social and cultural theory appropriate to the specific qualities of cyberspace, Poster reformulates the ideas of thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Derrida to account for and illuminate the virtual world, paying particular attention to its political dimensions and the nature of identity. In his analysis, Poster acknowledges that although the colonization of the Internet by corporations and governments does threaten to retard its capacity to bring about genuine change, the new medium is still capable of transforming both contemporary social practices and the way we see the world and ourselves. Series: Electronic Meditations |
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Review
The utopian hopes that many had invested in the Internet as a vehicle for social change have depreciated in recent years. Many observers, including Poster, view the growing presence of multi-national corporations and governmental institutions on the web as an effort by those in power to use the Internet to increase their control. Yet, whatever the current reality, Poster argues that it is crucial to examine the possibilities the Internet still offers as a site for constructing new ideas about the subject, identity, and the structures of power. Poster's provocative discussion reconsiders the ways in which the Internet can recast conventional notions of ethnicity, race, identity, the subject, authorship, global citizenship, and commodities. He also builds upon the theories of other thinkers, including Heidegger's writing on technology, Foucault's theory of the author and his feminist critique, and the works of Habermas, Baudrillard, and Derrida. This is a fresh and vital exploration of the internet that moves beyond the gloominess with which some social critics have brought to their discussion, opening up new ways to think about the medium and its democratic possibilities. Other recent titles dealing with the societal impact of the Internet: |
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