An Introduction to Cybercultures. (Media).David Bell David Bell may refer to:
New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Routledge, 2001 A volcano of ideas, inventions, politics, conventions, communities and technologies, cyberspace is a hot topic in academia these days. David Bell's An Introduction to Cybercultures is the latest in a flood of books aimed at the educational market that encapsulates the principal things to know. Following his co-edited anthology The Cybercultures Reader, published two years ago, Bell examines how the burgeoning cyberspace is an intimate confluence of culture and technology, of economies and information, of politics and communities, of bodies and virtualities. The more familiar academic discourse of cultural studies are overlaid on the various worlds and creatures of cyberspace: cyborgs, online communities, virtual reality, etc., confirming the necessity of critical cyberculture cy·ber·cul·ture n. The culture arising from the use of computer networks, as for communication, entertainment, work, and business. Noun 1. studies to parse the social, cultural and economic interactions that take place online. [paragraph] The most tantalizing tan·ta·lize tr.v. tan·ta·lized, tan·ta·liz·ing, tan·ta·liz·es To excite (another) by exposing something desirable while keeping it out of reach. chapter, "Bodies in Cyberspace," wrestles with the place of our bodies, tagged in cyberculture as "meat," in a sphere so redolent red·o·lent adj. 1. Having or emitting fragrance; aromatic. 2. Suggestive; reminiscent: a campaign redolent of machine politics. with bodily absence. Cultural studies in the 1980s were all about the body, so it is natural that an emerging discipline of cyberculture studies must face that legacy. In fact, the most radical theorizing of cyberspace lies in this imagined world, where our bodies are awkwardly or smoothly, reluctantly or enthusiastically, confronted with new bodies, future bodies or the complete lack of bodies. N. Katherine Hayles's ideas about the posthuman, the now infamous Donna Haraway essay "A Cyborg Manifesto," the work of Stelarc, and even The Matrix, are plumbed for their inquiry into the future role of the body in culture. The old questions stand: what is the body, who owns the body, where does power lie in relation to the body, etc.? But Bell also maps new questions: what about extending bodily awareness, or replacing meat with machine, or cohabitation A living arrangement in which an unmarried couple lives together in a long-term relationship that resembles a marriage. Couples cohabit, rather than marry, for a variety of reasons. They may want to test their compatibility before they commit to a legal union. with artificia l intelligence--are we already cyborgs? [paragraph] Like the behemoth behemoth (bē`hĭmŏth, bĭhē`–) [Heb.,=plural of beast], large, fanciful primeval monster, like Leviathan, evoking the hippopotamus mentioned in the Book of Job. Yahoo, which is a directory of sites chosen by a management staff and not a search engine like Google, Bell tends to collect other theorists' premises rather than develop his own, and he is not particularly eclectic in his approach. As a result An Introduction to Cybercultures reads more like condensed con·dense v. con·densed, con·dens·ing, con·dens·es v.tr. 1. To reduce the volume or compass of. 2. To make more concise; abridge or shorten. 3. Physics a. links found on a Web site than new theories expanding the field. In an arena ripe with big thinkers (or people that at least think big), futuristic fantasies and arcane hypotheses, such a collection creates an acceptable discourse for the many new academic courses offered around the compounded term "cyberculture." However, Bell misses the excitement and challenges of influential cyber-theoreticians, such as Paul Virillo or Bruno Latour, either of whom confound or explode notions of culture, politics, identities and economies as they trace their way through the emerging digital worlds. Why introduce students to the dryness of a carefully constructed introduction that seems fundamentally alien to the new cyber prefix, when someone like Mark Dery can run pell-mell through select highlights, and end up inspiring wild ideas, crazy projects and further reading without abandoning scholarly rigor rigor /rig·or/ (rig´er) [L.] chill; rigidity. rigor mor´tis the stiffening of a dead body accompanying depletion of adenosine triphosphate in the muscle fibers. ? 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