Desire In Cyberspace

University of Texas Professor Allucquere Rosanne Stone has delivered an exotic and surprising look at the interface of desire and technology. "The War of Desire and Technology..." (this is the book's third paperback printing) is brave, smart and, well...sexy. Stone looks at virtual cross-dressers, busy cyber-labs and phone sex to capture that strange but undeniably real point where the boundaries between our technologies and ourselves continue to implode. Not your typical academic writing about cyberspace. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close Of The Mechanical author Allucquere Rosanne Stone pages 210 publisher MIT Press rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-262-69189-2 summary where cyberspace becomes exotic

Lots of terms are used in connection cyberspace, but "sexy" and "desire" are not usually among them. Allucquerre Roseanne Stone, an assistant professor and director of the Interactive Multimedia Laboratory (ACTlab) at the University of Texas in Austin has changed that in her exotic, surprising, and well..sexy..new book: "The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age."

This provocative volume isn't quite what we've come to expect from academic writing about the Net and the Web. But it's haunting and long overdue. It's also brave, lunging past the blarney about porn and getting right at the erotic nature of techno-desire in cyberspace, which often has nothing to do with sex. Stone's premise is that there's a lot of desire involved with the interface of technology and individuals.

She writes about phone sex; the atmosphere and rituals of busy cyberlabs; the electronic isolation of browsing and the trial of a man accused of having raped a women by seducing one of her multiple personalities online. She couples the electronic voice-box that the astrophysicist Stephen Hawkins uses to communicate and the voice-only techniques of sex workers to wonder precisely where the body ends these days and software and hardware begins. This is a mesmerizing report from one of the unexplored fringes of the cyber-experience.

Stone writes engagingly about the high adventure of going online -- of uttering the vision and owning it. This adventure, she writes, "is our future, as we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in our own technologies; as the boundaries between our technologies and ourselves continue to implode; as we inexorably become creatures that we cannot even now imagine. It is a moment which simultaneously holds immense threat and immense promise. I don't want to lose sight of either, because we need to guide ourselves -- remember 'cyber' means steer -- in all our assembled forms and multiple selves right between the two towers of promise and danger, of desire and technology. In the space between them lies the path to our adventure at the dawn of the virtual age, the adventure which belongs to our time and which is ours alone."

Stone has definitely hit on something. Without question, there is something exotic about the intersection of the individual and cyberspace, and longings and desire, sexual and otherwise, that these often amazing and wondrous encounters evoke. Going online can be profoundly spiritual as well as erotic, but neither is explored very often or well amidst the culture's obession with pornography, gee-whiz gadgetry and dot.com hype.

From her enchanging introduction: "Sex, Death and Machinery, or How I Fell in Love with My Prothesis" Stone captures the imagination and delivers an intelligent and exotic romp through cyberspace and the imagination.

Purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Comments

Re:Is this sick, or normal?

[phil reed]

Dirty? No more so than any other human activity. There's nothing dirty about sex, except in people's minds. Sex is a driving force for people and has been ever since there has been people, so to say that it "...spells doom for a society..." is remarkably narrow-minded.

Sex is a proper thing. People get obsessed with it because we (the American society) is torn between accepting it and covering it up. Cultures that accept sex as a natural part of human existence don't have the problems we do.

And, I personally lump Pat Buchanan with Art Bell. The only reason they are useful is to serve as a bad example.


...phil