The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Hardcover)

Vincent Mosco

  • 出版商: MIT
  • 出版日期: 2004-02-27
  • 售價: $558
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 232
  • 裝訂: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 026213439X
  • ISBN-13: 9780262134392
  • 下單後立即進貨 (約5~7天)

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The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world.

Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture -- specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics -- we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it "with both eyes" -- that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.

After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances -- the telephone, the radio, and television, among others -- Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center -- our icons of communication, information, and trade -- and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.

Vincent Mosco is Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University and the author of The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal.

 

Table of Contents:

 

Acknowledgments vii
 
1 The Secret of Life 1
 
2 Myth and Cyberspace 17
 
3 Cyberspace and the End of History 55
 
4 Loose Ends: The Death of Distance, the End of Politics 85
 
5 When Old Myths Were New: The Ever-Ending Story 117
 
6 From Ground Zero to Cyberspace and Back Again 141
 
  Notes 185
 
  References 197
 
  Index 213