Unspun: key concepts for understanding the World Wide Web

Abstract

From Publisher: companion website: http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/unspun The World Wide Web has cut a wide path through our daily lives. As claims of the Web changes everything suffuse print media, television, movies, and even presidential campaign speeches, just how thoroughly do users immersed in this new technology understand it? What, exactly, is Web changing? And how might we participate in or even direct Web-related change? Intended for readers new to studying Internet, each chapter in Unspun addresses a different aspect of web revolution—hypertext, multimedia, authorship, community, governance, identity, gender, race, cyberspace, political economy, and ideology—as it shapes and is shaped by economic, political, social, and cultural forces. The contributors particularly focus on language of Web, exploring concepts that are still emerging and therefore unstable and in flux. Unspun demonstrates how tacit assumptions behind this rhetoric must be examined if we want to really know what we are saying when we talk about Web. Unspun will help readers more fully understand and become critically aware of issues involved in living, as we do, in a wired society. Contributors include: Jay Bolter, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Dawn Dietrich, Cynthia Fuchs, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Timothy Luke, Vincent Mosco, Lisa Nakamura, Russell Potter, Rob Shields, John Sloop, and Joseph Tabbi. Author Biography: Thomas Swiss is Center for Humanities Professor of English and Director of Web-Assisted Curriculum at Drake University. He is coauthor of The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power.