Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.

Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, Web/Blog Tools

The politics of cyberspace

Vranddiscontents
From some reading I was doing today.

Technology never escapes politics. The fiction of cyberspace is useful precisely to the extent that it allows it allows its proponents to imagine an androcentric reality in which a threatening, messy, or recalcitrant (and invariably feminized) nature never intrudes. In this respect, cyberspace is consensual primarily in its insistence that technologically mediated experience can transcend the ecological and economic constraints that have shaped and continue to shape human culture. It offers the fantasy that the more technologically sophisticated our society becomes the less it has to worry about the distribution of wealth and resources.

From: Robert Moss Markley “Introduction: History, Theory, and Virtual Reality.” In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Moss Markley, 1-10. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. (p.4)

This book is a collection of essays from writers who are more critical (even cynical) about the benefits offered by virtual reality and cyberspace, and the myths spun by the proponents of the technology.

1 Comment

  1. looks great, I just ordered that, thank you for the info/link