Customer Reviews

Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace (Politics and Culture series)

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Virtual politics - Identity and community in cyberspace, is a collection of academic writings from American, New Zealand and predominantly Australian academics on the topic of virtual reality and it's implications in society. The book was published in 1997 by David Holmes who is a senior lecture in sociology at Griffith University on Australia's Gold Coast and is an associate at both Melbourne and Edinburgh university's.

The book itself is form a series of books called Politics and Culture which is described as `A theory, culture and society series' dealing with major paradigms in politics, philosophy, international relations and tries to gain an understanding of citizenship, rights and social justice with a particular broad focus on globalization throughout the series.

One of the key themes of the book is that `electronically and digitally stimulated environments offer an important metaphor for understanding social relations' addressing sexuality, community and many social and communication issues, and often describes the internet and virtual reality as an extension of existing social structures.
The book has varying articles which range from Cyberdemoracy dealing with The Internet and the public sphere to Disembodiment in new virtual worlds provided by virtual reality. however the book is divided into two sections Part one `The self, Identity and body in the age of the virtual' and part two `Politics and community in virtual worlds'.
I found the book quite difficult to read and quite indepth and very theoretical. Much of the book is predicting the way in which virtual reality is going to affect society. In the areas of virtual community this book very much explored options to create academic debate and did it from a social science perspective which made the book often hard going for an undergraduate such as myself, also the change in conributors every chapter made it difficult to get use to the stlye of any one contributor.

Early in this section of the book we encounter the virtual community which is said to contribute to the speedy rise of the globalisation of information the book tries here to explain the virtual or cyber community specifically on the internet in relation to the social, political and technical conditions in info communities. One definition of a virtual community is that they are `Social aggregations that emerge from the net when people interact for long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace' creating a global village in a way as described by Marshall McLuhan. Largely in the first few chapters the authors agree that there is a general social trend towards abstract communities and that human association is becoming increasingly abstract, With globalisation on the rise the likelihood in the business world for the need for more face to face meetings occurs and with migration and accessible world travel we may suppose the opposite of abstract global communities however because of the occurrence of these intercultural meetings in real life the need to stay in touch and keep up contact results in more of a abstract virtual community or relationship within which
a culture of its own develops and it becomes a real communitiy influencing society....

This book is a collection of articles, but each is essential. The main discussion in this book is that of the concept of community. It is no longer, in cyberspace, what it used to be : people meeting at the same time, in the same place with common interests. It has to be redefined and discussed : the casual meeting of people from different places at the same time (though it is not the same clock time for each one of them) with no immediate and environmentallly-imposed common interests but with common intesrests that are selected by them and having to do with the topics each one of them is interested in at that moment of meeting. But this is a real community. And many articles show how the exchanges between these casually-meeting people can mutually influence the definitions they have of the topic, clarify the understanding they have of the stakes of the topic, and even modify their points of view and hence their attitudes in society when they get out of cyberspace. Cyberspace communities are thus becoming a permanent school based on exchanges, discussions and direct influence from one cybernaut onto the other or others. This has a direct influence on the definition of the individual and therefore on the definition of politics, because debates and information become the basis of the elaboration of one's political ideology and positions. Cyberspace is democratic in that way even if it is not based on voting but on confronting and exchanging. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.