Name : Mark Dery Time : Subject: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Date : |
| Escape Velocity What are the issues that will concern our increasingly digitized culture? The people exploring these questions most provocatively are those utilizing cutting-edge techology in ways never intended by its manufacturers. Taking human-machine interface as the focus of their attention, members of the thriving digital counterculure are posing the most fundamental question of our time: will technology be used as a mechanism of repression or as an engine of empowerment? In the first in-depth exploration of fringe computer culture, Mark Dery introduces readers to underground robotics, cybersex enthusiasts, virtual-reality designers, cyberpunk novelists, and would-be cyborgs. Exploring the social rituals, vanguard art, and philosophical concerns of this strange new world, Dery shifts the focus from the corporations that design the digital machines that are chaging our reality to the fringes of cyberculture, where real-life cyberpunks are pursuing the bright promise - and pondering the Orwellian threat - of these techologies. In a market flooded with "cyber"-titles, most of them breathless mixes of pop science and New Age futurism, Escape Velocity stands alone as the first truly critical inquiry in an area of our culture that increasingly claims our attention.
Grove Press, New York. |
