ABSTRACT
IN T H I S C H A P T E R and the one that follows, I want to focus on theways that cyberspace is talked about and written about. I shall pick out a number of ways of telling stories about cyberspace, and explore the kinds of stories that have been told. This assembling of stories is my attempt to sketch out an agenda for the rest of the book. What I want to stress is that any attempt to understand cyberspace and cyberculture must look at the stories we tell about these phenomena. Moreover, I want to suggest that we need to think about different modes of story-telling and different kinds of stories simultaneously, in order to understand how cyberspace and cyberculture are storied into being at the intersection of different knowledges and metaphors. The three strands of story-telling I identify as (1) material stories, (2) symbolic stories and (3) experiential stories. In similar moves, N. Katherine Hayles (1999b: 2) discusses ‘virtual creatures’ through what she calls three ‘modes of interrogation’: what they are, what they mean and what they do, and Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz (1996) use the terms ontology, phenomenology and pragmatics to discuss ways of thinking about technology. I shall provide my definition of what these three kinds of stories are about, sketch some of their narrative forms and contents, and highlight the ways that they intersect as the two chapters unfold. But before that, I need to attend to two further acts of definition: to define the terms cyberspace and cyberculture themselves.
