Internet Dreams

Internet Dreams illuminates not only how "the Net" is being created, but also stories about ourselves as our lives become electronically interconnected. Stefik explores some of the most provocative writings about the Internet to tease out the deeper metaphors and myths. 24 illustrations.

On average, we spend around six years of our lives dreaming. Yet, astonishingly, few of us understand the purpose of dreams and even fewer recognise what our dreaming mind can tell us about ourselves and our world. Melinda Powell, psychotherapist and co-founder of the Dream Research Institute UK, reveals how better understanding our dreams can improve our waking lives. As well as examining the importance of sleep and dreams, The Hidden Lives of Dreams explores the role of light, colour, landscapes, space, healing presence and lucidity in dreams, dispels common misconceptions and addresses our fears of nightmares. Powell shows how to tap into our dreams as a source of guidance and inspiration to enhance our wellbeing and to discover a healthier, more balanced approach to life. 'Exploring the depths of dreaming with an experienced guide like Melinda Powell will bring you closer to your heart, your purpose and your truest self. Highly recommended.' Robert Waggoner

The collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet: what led software designers, managers, employees, politicians, and individuals to develop and adopt one particular technology. In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet—the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical "information superhighway" became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another. Flichy draws on writings by experts—paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week—from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices; and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture—the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on "the virtual society imaginaire," discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.

Drawing on research in the social sciences, communications, and other fields, this book wants to analyze how the online environment is influencing the experience of psychology. However, understanding how the Internet is changing our everyday experience presents a substantial challenge for the psychologists. Now, research in this area is still sparse and limited in both the number and scope of studies: actual research, especially studies with strict methodologies, is only just beginning. The contributions in this book are among the first scientific attempts to take a serious look at various aspects of Internet-related psychology. However, we need not start from scratch. Psychology has a broad knowledge about the factors that affect human behaviour in other setting. So, the papers collected for this book are descriptive and practical-oriented in nature.

Many contemporary issues cannot be readily or fully understood at the level of the nation state and the concept of globalization is used to develop understanding through the analysis of global (transnational) processes. This volume explores the phenomenon of Americanization, and its worldwide impact, and the cultural consequences of globalization.

Stefik examines the "magic" of new technologies in light of older issues involving the conflict of values in society. Issues include censorship, copyright protection, privacy, and economic stability.

‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes how a dominant narrative has extensively contributed to the construction of the Internet myth while other visions of the networked society have been erased from the collective imaginary. The book decodes, analyzes and challenges the foundations of the network ideologies looking at how networks have been imagined, designed and promoted during the crucial phase of the 1990s. Three case studies are scrutinized so as to reveal the complexity of network imaginaries in this decade: the birth of the Web and the mythopoesis of its inventor; and the histories of two Italian networking projects, the infrastructural plan Socrate and the civic network Iperbole, the first to give free Internet access to citizens. The Internet Myth thereby provides a compelling and hidden sociohistorical narrative in order to challenge one of the most powerful myths of our time. This title has been published with the financial assistance of the Fondazione Hilda e Felice Vitali, Lugano, Switzerland.

This timely book offers a mapping of the Internet as it has developed and is used internationally, providing a lively and challenging examination of the Internet and Internet studies. There is much interest among scholars and researchers in understanding the place of the Internet in cultural, social, national, and regional settings. This is the first book-length account that not only provides a range of perspectives on the international Internet, but also explores the implications of such new knowledge and accounts for concepts, methods, and themes in Internet studies. Of special interest will be the book’s fresh and up-to-date coverage of the Internet in perhaps the most dynamic region at present: Asia-Pacific.