The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781936117413)

In this book, French author Philippe Breton looks at the Internet and the culture surrounding it through the lens of its cultural background. Central in his insightful analysis of "the Internet as cult" are Teilhard de Chardin and the New Age, but he looks also at the fears, passions and pathologies of Alan Turing and Norbert Wiener, the imagined worlds of Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard and Timothy Leary, the prognostications and confessions of Bill Gates, Nicolas Negroponte and Bill Joy, and the philosophies of Saint-Simon, McLuhan and Pierre L vy. Dreams of a transparent and unmediated world, a world in which neither time nor space are relevant, a world without violence, without law, without a distinction between the public and the private, Breton contrasts with the reality of propaganda, computer viruses and surveillance, the world in which "sociality in the sense of mutuality disappears in favor of interactivity," where "experience with another and with the world in general is replaced by brief reactionary relations that hardly engage us at all." This English language translation is by David Bade.

Author: Philippe Breton
ISBN-10: 193611741X
ISBN-13: 9781936117413
Publisher: Litwin Books
Language: English
Published: 03/15/2011
Pages: 188
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.42lbs
Size: 7.81h x 5.06w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 06/01/2011 pg. 102