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Title: Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace by Douglas Rushkoff ISBN: 1-903083-24-9 Publisher: Clinamen Press Ltd Pub. Date: 02 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: TechnoShamanism, Morphogenetics, occasional mistake
Comment: I found this book truly intriguing. The bits about the rave culture were a little off, and in the cases of his ecstasy coverage, very far off, but in general, it hits very close to the mark. I and many others that I associate with touch on the Technoshamanic view of the world. Rushkoff does an exceedingly good job demonstrating the relationships between psychadelics and innovation in areas like silicon valley and chaos theory mathematics. Read for yourself, judge for yourself.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting First Book On Cyberculture
Comment: 'Cyberia' (1994) was cyberculture theorist Douglas Rushkoff's first book, written in 1992 and delayed because the publishers felt that e-mail and the Internet were not likely to become significant.
'Cyberia' has its obvious flaws in retrospect - examples regarding the links between drug culture, hacking, the Internet, and computers that have since become well-known or overdone. Sometimes the tone is uncritical - probably because Rushkoff was so excited about the future potential of VR, the Internet etc. This book was written well before the Internet became the latest quarterly profit enhancer, well before the rise of Internet shopping malls and dubious e-mail chain letters. On its initial release, it made a significant impact, speeding up public acceptance of the Internet as a communications medium, and heralding the cultural 'future-shocks' regarding personal identity that will accompany it. Criticism is also prompted by a backlash against the author and his success.
'Cyberia' is best read as the author's first book, which succeeds in capturing the hope of a moment and sense of an underground movement that was pre-'Wired' magazine and pre E-commerce. There are some powerful sections such as a gonzo trip to the offices of 'Mondo 2000' and meetings with R.U. Sirius; Rushkoff checking out college colleagues entering Silicon Valley and being forced to take drug tests; and talks with Ralph Abraham, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna.
Read critically but thoughtfully.
Rating: 4
Summary: indexed historiographed and forgotten
Comment: In 1994, Doug Rushkoff set out to write an embedded, analytic travelogue linking a series of countercultural trends dealing with emerging networks and internet technologies. Instead of conducting technopunditry from the sidelines, Rushkoff got into the fray and followed around ravers, hackers,performance artists and writers whose philosophies emerged around a new surge of technoutopianism; linked inextricably with paganism, spirituality, and Eastern Philosphy. His aproach echoes the Tom Wolfe school subjective reporting, learning the lexicon of the object of study, trying to speak the language and reveal something about its psychology. What results is some snappy, breakneck prose colored philosophically and poetically by chaos mathematics and cyberpunk literature. This makes this book eminently fun, readable, and exciting. It also makes much of its proposed social and political uses for technology widely inaccurate. In a way, ten years removed, Cyberia should be appreciated now more than ever. We know better. And all of the wide-eyed fantasizing about decentralized spirituality and some wonderful fin de siecle millenial rapture spurned on by virtual reality are no longer dangerous or deluding, they can be seen in context, as thought waves that are spilled out of more optimistic time periods with exponential technological growth. The connect the dots game that Rushkoff plays is pretty astute, as well: the hippy connection, the second wave optimism that the 90s proposed to reconcile the "defeat" of the 60s, the fulmination of rave culture around these ideas that arrived in Berkely. A good book to read this book against would be Escape Velocity by Mark Dery, which is a little more "down to Earth", covers some similar material, and contains a counterpoint to Cyberia. Rushkoff himself has distanced himself widely from the rhetoric used in this book, but even this does not discredit this as a seminal text when looking at the viewpoints of subcultures built around technology.
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Title: Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say by Douglas Rushkoff ISBN: 157322829X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Parallax - Re-Visions of Culture and Society) by George P. Landow, George P. Landlow ISBN: 0801855861 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1997 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince ISBN: 0801877539 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle (Re/Search #4/5) by V. Vale ISBN: 0965046915 Publisher: Re-Search Pubns Pub. Date: January, 1982 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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Title: Media Virus! by Douglas Rushkoff ISBN: 0345397746 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 06 February, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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