An Introduction to Cybercultures. . - Media - book review

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Jane D. Marsching

David Bell

New York: Routledge, 2001

A volcano of ideas, inventions, politics, conventions, communities and technologies, cyberspace is a hot topic in academia these days. David Bell's An Introduction to Cybercultures is the latest in a flood of books aimed at the educational market that encapsulates the principal things to know. Following his co-edited anthology The Cybercultures Reader, published two years ago, Bell examines how the burgeoning cyberspace is an intimate confluence of culture and technology, of economies and information, of politics and communities, of bodies and virtualities. The more familiar academic discourse of cultural studies are overlaid on the various worlds and creatures of cyberspace: cyborgs, online communities, virtual reality, etc., confirming the necessity of critical cyberculture studies to parse the social, cultural and economic interactions that take place online. [paragraph]

The most tantalizing chapter, "Bodies in Cyberspace," wrestles with the place of our bodies, tagged in cyberculture as "meat," in a sphere so redolent with bodily absence. Cultural studies in the 1980s were all about the body, so it is natural that an emerging discipline of cyberculture studies must face that legacy. In fact, the most radical theorizing of cyberspace lies in this imagined world, where our bodies are awkwardly or smoothly, reluctantly or enthusiastically, confronted with new bodies, future bodies or the complete lack of bodies. N. Katherine Hayles's ideas about the posthuman, the now infamous Donna Haraway essay "A Cyborg Manifesto," the work of Stelarc, and even The Matrix, are plumbed for their inquiry into the future role of the body in culture. The old questions stand: what is the body, who owns the body, where does power lie in relation to the body, etc.? But Bell also maps new questions: what about extending bodily awareness, or replacing meat with machine, or cohabitation with artificia l intelligence--are we already cyborgs? [paragraph]

Like the behemoth Yahoo, which is a directory of sites chosen by a management staff and not a search engine like Google, Bell tends to collect other theorists' premises rather than develop his own, and he is not particularly eclectic in his approach. As a result An Introduction to Cybercultures reads more like condensed links found on a Web site than new theories expanding the field. In an arena ripe with big thinkers (or people that at least think big), futuristic fantasies and arcane hypotheses, such a collection creates an acceptable discourse for the many new academic courses offered around the compounded term "cyberculture." However, Bell misses the excitement and challenges of influential cyber-theoreticians, such as Paul Virillo or Bruno Latour, either of whom confound or explode notions of culture, politics, identities and economies as they trace their way through the emerging digital worlds. Why introduce students to the dryness of a carefully constructed introduction that seems fundamentally alien to the new cyber prefix, when someone like Mark Dery can run pell-mell through select highlights, and end up inspiring wild ideas, crazy projects and further reading without abandoning scholarly rigor?

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Popular Cinema of the Third Reich by Sabine Hake. University of Texas Press/272 pp./$24.95 (sb).

Popular Cinemas of Europe by Dimitris Eleftheriotis. Continuum International/248 pp./$29.95 (sb).

Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 1971-1984 by Van Burnham. MIT Press/488 pp./$49.95 (hb).

The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words by Britta Erickson. University of Washington Press/112 pp./$22.50 (sb).

The Artist's Complete Health and Safety Guide by Monona Rossol. Allworth Press/416 pp./$24.95 (sb).

The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings by Coco Fusco. Routledge/252 pp./$22.95 (sb).

The Complete Guide to Digital Imaging by Joel Lacy. Watson-Guptill Publications/224 pp./$35.00 (sb).