Howard Rheingold: This is an interesting site, very personalized. Be sure to check out What's New & Rheingoldian? BTW, you can find a copy of Rheingold's entire book Virtual Communities online at <http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/ >. Here's an Interview with HR. And here's The Well--Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link--which became a virtual community of communities. || Want to know more about the Well, read Katie Hafner's "The Epic Saga of the Well". HotWired 5.05 (May 1997).
Sherry Turkle Home Page: Here you will find Turkle's biography and a list of courses that Turkle has taught on cyberspace.
Mark Slouka has no Home Page. Can you think of Why he does not have one? Make a search for his name at AltaVista.
More References for surfing the Web
(that supplement the readings):
CyberTown: The 3DVR Community of the Future: It's the year 2087 and there is a whole town out in cyberspace! If you have questions then go to the FAQs.
Blacksburg Electronic Village ... Blacksburg, VA, w/here on line, the future is now!
Worlds Away. Choose a World. The site announcement says, "WorldsAway technology enables people to interact with each other in real-time, animated graphical environments. Worlds Away members fall in love, build societies, and share experiences in communities unlike any others."
The Contact Corsortium Home Page: Contact, Culture and Community in Digital Space. Numerous links to virtual communities.
Net Tribes: Future Culture, with links to Origins and Overview - Web starting points - Virtual Culture - Psychedelic Culture - Rave Culture - Cyberculture - Industrial Culture - PostModernism - Street Culture - Fringe Science - Social and Public Policy issues - Society - Cybersex - Censorship and Hackers - Future ?
FutureCulture:
The FutureCulture mailing list has to be one of the better known lists
on what could be termed the Alternative Circuit on the Net. Started by
Andy Hawks, it has survived net.death several times and continues to
evolve with a sense of real community.
FutureCulture is deliberately broad in scope when it comes to the
topics discussed, but a quick list might include:
* Technoculture/new edge/cyberculture
* Cyberspace & the Internet
* Virtual reality
* The computer underground
* Cyberpunk (literary and cultural movements)
* Raves and rave culture
* Media (music/movies/books/magazines) that are relevant
* Virtual communities
* Social and public policy issues
However, be warned that FutureCulture is not just another generic K00L
cyberpunk discussion list, but rather a community. Sometimes we
discuss Artificial Life and nanotech, sometimes we discuss the future
of monogamy and the misery of breaking up. We're cyborgs, but we're
also humans.
Future Culture info
* FutureCulture introduction
* The FutureCulture FAQ, from March 1993 (Note that this FAQ is not
updated as to reflect the current state of the list, which
naturall has a focus somewhat different from what it had two years
ago...)
* Archives of messages on the list, starting October 7th 1994
* FutureCulture people's home pages
* The introductions thread from September 1994, in which a lot of FC
people introduced themselves. Kindly supplied by Gregory H.
Ritter.
|
The UCLA Center for Online Community: "The Center for the Study of Online Community seeks to present and foster studies that focus on how computers and networks alter people's capacity to form groups, organizations, institutions, and how those social formations are able to serve the collective interests of their members."
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility A Campaign on Internet Governance.
CyberCafe Guide, Everything that you every wanted to know about cybercafes and their locations.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Archives, Net Culture and Cyber-Anthropology. There are numerous, excellent articles on virtual communities.
"The Ethics of Research in Virtual Communities": A MediaMOO Symposium
Here's an interesting question on the ethics of making links: Liu, Alan. "Should We Link to the Unabomber? An Essay on Practical Web Ethics". --> Having answered the question for myself, here is his Manifesto, which is found at HotWired with numerous links to sites where people have responded and thereby have created a virtual community of discussants.
International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 1994 Proceedings on Spacescapes: An excellent of articles by authorative writers on virtual identities and virtual architecture as well as other topics.
CyberSoc Bibliography: An excellent list of book, chapters, and articles on virtual communities.
Cyberpoet's Guide to Virtual Culture, loads of information about V-Culture.
Newsgroups:
alt.virtual-adepts
alt.cybercafes
Stretching the Readings a Bit...:
In the first edition of CR, I included a discussion of the theme/topic "HyperReality," which simply translated can mean an extension of reality, or in other words, making real more real than real. This can be a very difficult concept to grasp at any level, but one that is well worth the time spent trying to understand. Umberto Eco has written about HyperReality; you will find the reference to "Enchanted Castles" in Travels in HyperReality in the Bibliography for this chapter. After reading the selected chapter, you might like to visit:
Umberto
Eco in "Enchanted Castles" refers
to The Madonna
Inn |
Hearst Castle |
(For related site, see In Search of Xanadu).
Eco writes: "... for this journey into hyperreality ... the American
imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the
absolute fake." Eco continues: "Hearst's castle is not an
unicum, not a rara avis: It fits into the California tourist
landscape with perfect coherence, among the waxwork Last Suppers and
Disneyland."
--> Why have I linked enchanted castles with the Madonna Inn and could have with
Madonna (the pop star), but did with Disney sites (in the U.S. and then in Paris and
Tokyo), and urban legends? What do they all have in common? What are they
developing into by way of possible associations? Do they tell a story or
stories? Start out with the possible connections between the Madonna
Inn and Madonna. Or the Hearst Castle and Disneyland. (In the medium of
hypertext--which the WWW is--linear development of ideas is not necessary
or even expected; instead, associational developments can and do become
the norm. We will take up this difference again in chapter 5.) Has reading
Eco's discussion helped you see possible connections or associations? Or
can you go beyond Eco's characterization? What are the political
implications of Eco's statement about Americans and the rest of the
world?
Once again, the Search Engines:
|| HotBot || AltaVista || Yahoo ||
Introduction to Researching
