The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology

Moving beyond traditional cyberculture studies paradigms in several key ways, this comprehensive collection marks the increasing convergence of cyberculture with other forms of media, and with all aspects of our lives in a digitized world.

• Includes essential readings for both the student and scholar of a diverse range of fields, including new and digital media, internet studies, digital arts and culture studies, network culture studies, and the information society
• Incorporates essays by both new and established scholars of digital cultures, including Andy Miah, Eugene Thacker, Lisa Nakamura, Chris Hables Gray, Sonia Livingstone and Espen Aarseth
• Created explicitly for the undergraduate student, with comprehensive introductions to each section that outline the main ideas of each essay
• Explores the many facets of cyberculture, and includes sections on race, politics, gender, theory, gaming, and space
• The perfect companion to Nayar's Introduction to New Media and Cyberculture

Preface ix

Acknowledgments x

Acknowledgments to Sources xii

Introduction 1

PART ONE THEORIES, POETICS, PRACTICES 7

1 Web Sphere Analysis and Cybercultural Studies 11
Kirsten Foot

2 What Does it Mean to be Posthuman? 19
N. Katherine Hayles

3 Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Convergence Media in the Digital Age 29
Anna Everett

4 The Double Logic of Remediation 46
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

5 The Database 50
Lev Manovich

6 Making Meaning of Mobiles: A Theory of Apparatgeist 65
James E. Katz and Mark A. Aakhus

PART TWO SPACE, PLACE, COMMUNITY 77

7 Post-Sedentary Space 79
William J. Mitchell

8 The End of Geography or the Explosion of Place?: Conceptualizing Space, Place and Information Technology 90
Stephen Graham

9 Asphalt Games: Enacting Place Through Locative Media 109
Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman

10 Thought on the Convergence of Digital Media, Memory, and Social and Urban Spaces 117
Federico Casalegno

PART THREE RACE IN/AND CYBERSPACE 129

11 Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction 132
Lisa Nakamura

12 Thinking Through the Diaspora: Call Centers, India, and a New Politics of Hybridity 151
Raka Shome

13 Voices of the Marginalized on the Internet: Examples from a Website for Women of South Asia 166
Ananda Mitra

PART FOUR BODIES, EMBODIMENT, BIOPOLITICS 183

14 Hypes, Hopes and Actualities: New Digital Cartesianism and Bodies in Cyberspace 185
Megan Boler

15 The Bioethics of Cybermedicalization 209
Andy Miah and Emma Rich

16 Biocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing of the Population 221
Eugene Thacker

PART FIVE GENDER, SEX, AND SEXUALITIES 251

17 Assembling Bodies in Cyberspace: Technologies, Bodies, and Sexual Difference 254
Dianne Currier

18 Lesbians in (Cyber)space: The Politics of the Internet in Latin American On- and Off-line Communities 268
Elisabeth Jay Friedman

19 E-Rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the Digital Economy 284
Blaise Cronin and Elisabeth Davenport

20 Race, Gender and Sex on the Net: Semantic Networks of Selling and Storytelling Sex Tourism 307
Peter A. Chow-White

PART SIX POLITICS, POLITICAL ACTION, ACTIVISM 325

21 Internet Studies in Times of Terror 328
David Silver and Alice Marwick

22 Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy 335
Tiziana Terranova

23 Ensuring Minority Rights in a Pluralistic and "Liquid" Information Society 357
Birgitte Kofod Olsen

24 Hacktivism: All Together in the Virtual 369
Tim Jordan

PART SEVEN GAMES, GAMING, META-UNIVERSES 379

25 Games Telling Stories: A Brief Note on Games and Narratives 382
Jesper Juul

26 WoW is the New MUD: Social Gaming from Text to Video 394
Torill Elvira Mortensen

27 Women and Games: Technologies of the Gendered Self 408
Pam Royse, Joon Lee, Baasanjav Undrahbuyan, Mark Hopson, and Mia Consalvo

28 To the White Extreme: Conquering Athletic Space, White Manhood, and Racing Virtual Reality 425
David J. Leonard

29 Your Second Life?: Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Property in Online Digital Gaming 441
Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe, and Lewis Kaye

PART EIGHT THE DIGITAL, THE MOBILE, THE PERSONAL, AND THE EVERYDAY 465

30 Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers' Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-expression 468
Sonia Livingstone

31 Dynamics of Internet Dating 483
Helene M. Lawson and Kira Leck

32 Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web 499
Madeleine Sorapure

33 Your Life in Snapshots: Mobile Weblogs 515
Nicola Döring and Axel Gundolf

34 Assembling Portable Talk and Mobile Worlds: Sound Technologies and Mobile Social Networks 526
John Farnsworth and Terry Austrin

35 New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture 534
Vincent Miller

Index 544

"Recommended. Lower-and-upper division undergraduates; general readers." (Choice , 1 April 2011)

"This collection is a timely, thought-provoking reflection on the social and cultural impacts of cyberspace and new media. I highly recommend it to scholars, teachers, students and indeed all those interested in new media and cyberculture." (M/C Reviews, September 11, 2010)

Pramod K. Nayar teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology (2004), Reading Culture: Theory, Praxis, Politics (2006), An Introduction to Cultural Studies (2008), Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (2009), Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday (2009), and An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology collects essential readings for both the student and scholar of a diverse range of fields, including new and digital media, internet studies, digital arts and culture studies, network culture studies, and the information society. Created for the undergraduate, this wide-ranging and diverse collection explores the many facets of cyberculture, and includes sections on race, politics, gender, theory, gaming, and space.

The perfect companion to Nayar's Introduction to New Media and Cyberculture, the volume incorporates essays by both new and established scholars of digital cultures, including Kathy Hayles, Andy Miah, Lev Manovich, Eugene Thacker, Lisa Nakamura, Sonia Livingstone, and Jesper Juul. Moving beyond traditional cyberculture studies paradigms in several key ways, this comprehensive collection marks the increasing convergence of cyberculture with other forms of media, and with all aspects of our everyday lives in a digitized world.

"Underscoring the larger socio-political, economic and cultural contexts of digital and new media cultures, this refreshingly diverse and interdisciplinary collection of scholarship offers a significant and timely contribution to the field of cyberculture studies."
—Kristin Scott, George Mason University

"What are cybercultures? Today, this question can only be asked and answered in the plural. The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology gives us a broad and well-nigh definitive sampling of reflections on how new technologies have changed our lives."
—Steven Shaviro, author of Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society

"It is obvious that screens, and what happens on them, are only part of the story of new media in the early 21st century. These texts, ambitiously brought together by Pramod K. Nayar, provide some significant signposts for grasping the networks of flesh, fiber and affect operating inside, outside and beyond the screen."
—Ryan Griffis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"This collection gathers together interesting and important essays which enable its readers to usefully and sensibly approach to the studies of new media and cyberculture."
—Terri He, Kaohsiung Medical University and National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan