Cyberspaces of Everyday Life

2006
Author:

Mark Nunes

How network technologies produce social space

Cyberspaces of Everyday Life provides a critical framework for understanding how the Internet takes part in the production of social space. Addressing the social implications of spam and anti-spam legislation, as well as how the Patriot Act has affected the relationship between networked spaces and daily living, Mark Nunes sheds light on the question of virtual space and its role in the offline world.

Cyberspaces of Everyday Life by Mark Nunes provides a critical framework for understanding how the Internet takes part in the creation or production of social spaces.

Communications Booknotes Quarterly

Networks and computer-mediated communication now penetrate the spaces of everyday life at a fundamental level. We communicate, work, bank, date, check the weather, and fuel conspiracy theories online. In each instance, users interact with network technology as much more than a computational device.

Cyberspaces of Everyday Life provides a critical framework for understanding how the Internet takes part in the production of social space. Mark Nunes draws on the spatial analysis work of Henri Lefebvre to make sense of cyberspace as a social product. Looking at online education, he explores the ways in which the Internet restructures the university. Nunes also examines social uses of the World Wide Web and illustrates the ways online communication alters the relation between the global and the local. He also applies Deleuzian theory to emphasize computer-mediated communications’s performative elements of spatial production.

Addressing the social and cultural implications of spam and anti-spam legislation, as well as how the burst Internet stock bubble and the Patriot Act have affected the relationship between networked spaces and daily living, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life sheds new light on the question of virtual space and its role in the offline world.

Mark Nunes is associate professor and chair of the English, technical communication, and media arts department at Southern Polytechnic State University.

Cyberspaces of Everyday Life by Mark Nunes provides a critical framework for understanding how the Internet takes part in the creation or production of social spaces.

Communications Booknotes Quarterly

This foreboding knowledge will hover in the shadows of the everyday life of anyone who reads this excellent book.

Convergences

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction Networks, Space, and Everyday Life

1. THE PROBLEM OF CYBERSPACE
2. VIRTUAL WORLDS AND SITUATED SPACES Topographies of the World Wide Web
3. EMAIL, THE LETTER, AND THE POST
4. STUDENT BODIES

Afterword
Digital Dis-strophe Notes
Works Cited

Index