Amazon doesn't have any details on this book, so I've collected below a number of comments from elsewhere on the web. In this book an international team of authors explore themes of depth and surface, of real and conceptual space and of human/ machine interaction. The collection is organized around the concept of 'technospace' -- the temporal realm where technology meets human practice. In exploring this intersection, the contributors initiate debate on a number of important conceptual questions: * Is there a clear distinction between the 'real' spaces of the body or the city and the conceptual space of 'virtual' reality? * How are the real and metaphorical spaces of electronic cultures quantified and regulated? * Is there an ethic of technospace? Historically the reception of new technologies has been invested with romantic idealism on the one hand and panic on the other. The authors argue that in order for utopian dreams to be tempered by ethical, humanistic needs, we have an urgent need to reveal, reflect upon and evaluate technospace and our relationship to it. Science and technology have had a profound affect on the way humans perceive space and time -think, for example of the way information technologies such as the telephone have reduced our former perception of the world as inaccessible, unknowable and exotic to a sensibility of nearness, friendliness, fellowship and instantaneity (the so-called "global village"). The scientific knowledge which produces technology remains a system of beliefs, the perspectives of science are thought-structures, that is ideologies, which organise the world into sets of believable fictions. Although science has tried to define "the thing in itself", it ends up exploring "the thing for me", through the practical postulate - the praxis - of space/time paradigms. This had had a practical effect upon our invention, and our use, of new technologies. People meet technology in technospaces, places outside the body and the city and reality -- or are they? Contributors reflect on Luddite concerns and the possibilities of a tech-driven Utopia. |