[Air-L] Fwd: New from NYU Press: Cached

stephanie schulte stephanieschulte at gmail.com
Fri Mar 29 14:01:50 PDT 2013


Hello,
I thought my new book might interest some listserv members.
Best wishes,
Steph

*Cached <http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=8212>*: Decoding
the Internet in Global Popular Culture (NYU Press, 2013)

In the 1980s and 1990s, the internet became a major player in the global
economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the
United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one
another, to share their lives, and to spend their time—shopping, working,
learning, and even taking political or social action. Policymakers and news
media attempted—and often struggled—to make sense of the emergence and
expansion of this new technology. They imagined the internet in conflicting
terms: as a toy for teenagers, a national security threat, a new democratic
frontier, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework
for promoting globalization and revolution.

Schulte maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and
helped shape not just our sense of the internet, but the development of the
technology itself. *Cached* focuses on how people imagine and relate to
technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that produced
the internet as a core technology able to revise economics, politics, and
culture, as well as to alter lived experience. Schulte illustrates the
conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and policy combined to
produce this transformative technology.

*Stephanie Ricker Schulte* is Assistant Professor of Communication at the
University of Arkansas.

"This is the most culturally sophisticated history of the Internet yet
written. We can't make sense of what the Internet means in our lives
without reading Schulte's elegant account of what the Internet has meant at
various points in the past 30 years."
—Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chair of the Department of Media Studies, University
of Virginia



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