ABSTRACT

This book examines the interrelationship between telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental in the production of homogenous world-spaces, and how htese, in turn, presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity.

Virtual Geographies explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature:
* investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed
* offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies
* explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world. This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.

chapter 1|20 pages

Introduction

part |86 pages

Part I Embedding the virtual

chapter 2|21 pages

Toward the light ‘within'

Optical technologies, spatial metaphors and changing subjectivities

chapter 3|19 pages

The telephone

Its social shaping and public negotiation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London

chapter 4|16 pages

Consumers or workers?

Restructuring telecommunications in Aotearoa/New Zealand

chapter 5|13 pages

Transnationalism, technoscience and difference

The analysis of material-semiotic practices

chapter 6|15 pages

The convergence of virtual and actual in the Global Matrix

Artificial life, geo-economics and psychogeography

part |95 pages

Part II Cyberscapes

chapter 7|22 pages

From city space to cyberspace

chapter 9|15 pages

Rural telematics

The Information Society and rural development

chapter 10|14 pages

Internauts and guerrilleros

The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico and its extension into cyberspace

part |81 pages

Part III Thinking and writing the virtual

chapter 12|17 pages

The virtual realities of technology and fiction

Reading William Gibson's cyberspace

chapter 13|22 pages

On boundfulness

The space of hypertext bodies

chapter 15|23 pages

Virtual worlds

Simulation, suppletion, s(ed)uction and simulacra