Virtual Geographies


Book Description

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.




Virtual Geography


Book Description

"The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media] events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling." -- Choice "... a wide-ranging, quirky and dextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of the global telecommunications network... " -- Times Literary Supplement "... this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." -- The New Statesman "Wark is one of the most original and interesting cultural critics writing today." -- Lawrence Grossberg McKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everyday life under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.




Virtual Geographies


Book Description

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 literatur.




Virtual Geographies


Book Description

Virtual Geographies is the first detailed study to offer a working definition of cyberpunk within the postmodern force field. Cyberpunk emerges as a new generic cluster within science fiction, one that has spawned many offspring in such domains as film, music, and feminism. Its central features are its adherence to a version of virtual space and a deconstructivist, punk attitude towards (high) culture, modernity, the human body and technology, from computers to prosthetics.The main proponents of cyberpunk are analyzed in depth along with the virtual landscapes they have created - William Gibson’s Cyberspace, Pat Cadigan’s Mindscapes and Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse. Virtual reality is examined closely in all its aspects, from the characteristic narrative constructions employed to the esthetic implications of the ‘virtual sublime’ and its postmodern potential as a discursive mode.With its interdisciplinary approach Virtual Geographies opens up fresh perspectives for scholars interested in the interaction between popular culture and mainstream literature. At the same time, the science fiction fan will be taken beyond the conventional boundaries of the genre into such revitalizing domains as postmodern architecture and literature, and into cutting-edge aspects of science and social thought.




Virtual Reality in Geography


Book Description

Virtual Reality in Geography covers "through the window" VR systems, "fully immersive" VR systems, and hybrids of the two types. The authors examine the Virtual Reality Modeling Language approach and explore its deficiencies when applied to real geographic environments. This is a totally unique book covers all the major uses and methods of virtual reality used by geographers. The authors have produced a CDROM that comes with the book of virtual reality images that will be a fascinating companion to the text. This book will be of great interest to geographers, computer scientists and all those interested in multimedia and computer graphics.




Geographies of Media and Communication


Book Description

Geographies of Media and Communication From the invention of the telegraph to the emergence of the Internet, communications technologies have transformed the ways that people and places relate to each other. Geographies of Media and Communication is the first textbook to treat all aspects of geography’s variegated encounter with communication. Connecting geographical ideas with communication theories such as intertextuality, audience-centered theory, and semiotics, Paul C. Adams explores media representations of places, the spatial diffusion of communication technologies, and the power of communication technologies to transform places, and to dictate who does and does not belong in them.




The Geographies of Digital Sexuality


Book Description

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from ‘real life.’ Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.




Changing Digital Geographies


Book Description

This book examines the changing digital geographies of the Anthropocene. It analyses how technologies are providing new opportunities for communication and connection, while simultaneously deepening existing problems associated with isolation, global inequity and environmental harm. By offering a reading of digital technologies as ‘more-than-real’, the author argues that the productive and destructive possibilities of digital geographies are changing important aspects of human and non-human worlds. Like the more-than-human notion and how it emphasises interconnections of humans and non-humans in the world, the more-than-real inverts the diminishing that accompanies use of the terms ‘virtual’ and ‘immaterial’ as applied to digital spaces. Digital geographies are fluid, amorphous spaces made of contradictory possibilities in this Anthropocene moment. By sharing experiences of people involved in trying to improve digital geographies, this book offers stories of hope and possibility alongside stories of grief and despair. The more-than-real concept can help us understand such work – by feminists, digital rights activists, disability rights activists, environmentalists and more. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this book will appeal to academics, university students, and activists who are keen to learn from other people’s efforts to change digital geographies, and who also seek to remake digital geographies.




Virtual Geographic Environments


Book Description

Virtual Geographic Environments, edited by Hui Lin and Michael Batty, collects key papers that define the current momentum in GIS and "virtual geographies." Contributions by leading members of the geospatial community to Virtual Geographic Environments illustrate the cutting edge of GIScience, as well as new applications of GIS with the processing and delivery of geographic information through the Web and handheld devices, forming two major directions to these developments. The four-part organization leads from a primer on VGEs to virtual cities and landscapes, interface design and public participation, and finally mobile and networked VGEs. Current topics, such as crowd sourcing and related services, point to the development of new business models that merge proprietary and nonproprietary systems.




Mental Health and Social Space


Book Description

Through a series of case studies this book brings to the fore the voices, lives, and capacities of people with mental health problems as well as the difficulties they face. It effectively demonstrates the ways people with mental health problems are active in re-scripting versions of social recovery through their use of very different community spaces. Offers a 'hopeful epistemology' not typically found in mental health-related research Interrogates neo-liberal dogma that defines people with mental health problems as active social citizens wholly responsible for their own recoveries and acceptance Brings to the fore the voices of, lives, capacities and difficulties facing people with mental health problems Imaginatively differentiates rural, urban, interest and technological communities, disrupting familiar and conventional accounts of social inclusion and 'the local' Demonstrates how people with mental health problems are active in re-scripting their own social recoveries through their use and understanding of different social spaces