Virtual Geographies

<p>This book examines the interrelationship between telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental in the production of homogenous world-spaces, and how htese, in turn, presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity.<br><br><em>Virtual Geographies</em> explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature:<br>* investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed<br>* offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies<br>* explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world. This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.</p> 1 Introduction PART I Embedding the virtual 2 Toward the light ‘within’: optical technologies, spatial metaphors and changing subjectivities 3 The telephone: its social shaping and public negotiation in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century London 4 Consumers or workers?: restructuring telecommunications in Aotearoa/New Zealand 5 Transnationalism, technoscience and difference: the analysis of material-semiotic practices 6 The convergence of virtual and actual in the Global Matrix: artificial life, geo-economics and psychogeography PART II Cyberscapes 7 From city space to cyberspace 8 Geographies of surveillant simulation 9 Rural telematics: The Information Society and rural development 10 Internauts and guerrilleros: the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico and its extension into cyberspace 11 Gender and the landscapes of computing in an Internet café PART III Thinking and writing the virtual 12 The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibson’s cyberspace 13 On boundfulness: the space of hypertext bodies 14 Unthinkable complexity? Cyberspace otherwise 15 Virtual worlds: simulation, suppletion, s(ed)uction and simulacra