Living on Cybermind

New literacies emerge and evolve apace as people from all walks of life engage with new technologies, shifting values and institutional change. This series aims to explore some key dimensions of the changes occurring within social practices of literacy and the educational challenges they present, with a view to informing educational practice in helpful ways. Collectively, the works in this series will help to reorient literacy debates and literacy education agendas.

Cybermind is an Internet mailing list, originally founded in 1994 to discuss the issues and problems of living online. It proved exceptionally fertile and is still going strong thirteen years later. This book is an ethnographic investigation which follows Cybermind members in their daily lives on the List, and explores the ways they look at the world, argue, relate online life to offline life, use gender, and build community. Perhaps the most comprehensive history of an Internet group ever published, it includes detailed analyses using List members' own words and commentary, and develops a unique theory of the relationship between culture, the problems of communication, and the ongoing processes of categorisation. Living on Cybermind illustrates how behaviour is affected by the organisation of communication, and how people deal with the paradoxes involved in resolving ambiguity and truth in a situation in which presence is always on the verge of slipping away.

Auteur

The Author: Jonathan Paul Marshall has an M.A. (Hons) and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Sydney. He has been an Australian Research Council Research Fellow at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, working on a project on online gender. Some publications include: «Cybermind: Paradoxes of Gender and Relationship in an Online Group», in Samantha Holland (ed.), Remote Relationships in a Small World (Peter Lang, forthcoming); «Categories, Gender and Online Community» in E-Learning, 3(2); «Negri, Hardt, Distributed Governance and Open Source Software» in Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 3(1); and «The Sexual Life of Cyber-Savants» in The Australian Journal of Anthropology 14(2). Marshall has also written on the historical relationship between the occult and science and technology. His next project involves the exploration of the relationship between modes of ordering and modes of disruption, focusing on the use of information technology.