Visit the Unspun website which includes Table of Contents and the
Introduction.
The World Wide Web has cut a wide path through our daily lives. As
claims of "the Web changes everything" suffuse print media, television,
movies, and even presidential campaign speeches, just how thoroughly do
the users immersed in this new technology understand it? What, exactly,
is the Web changing? And how might we participate in or even direct
Web-related change?
Intended for readers new to studying the Internet, each chapter in
Unspun addresses a different aspect of the "web
revolution"--hypertext, multimedia, authorship, community, governance,
identity, gender, race, cyberspace, political economy, and ideology--as
it shapes and is shaped by economic, political, social, and cultural
forces. The contributors particularly focus on the language of the Web,
exploring concepts that are still emerging and therefore unstable and in
flux. Unspun demonstrates how the tacit assumptions behind this
rhetoric must be examined if we want to really know what we are saying
when we talk about the Web.
Unspun will help readers more fully understand and become critically
aware of the issues involved in living, as we do, in a wired society.
Contributors include: Jay Bolter, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Dawn Dietrich,
Cynthia Fuchs, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Timothy Luke, Vincent Mosco, Lisa
Nakamura, Russell Potter, Rob Shields, John Sloop, and Joseph Tabbi.