The Internet Imaginaire

By Patrice Flichy

Book Overview

The collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet: what led software designers, managers, employees, politicians, and individuals to develop and adopt one particular technology. In The Internet Imaginaire , sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet--the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical "information superhighway" became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another. Flichy draws on writings by experts--paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week--from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices; and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture--the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on "the virtual society imaginaire," discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262062615
• ISBN13: 9780262062619
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.3" x 7.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The history of the Internets

This book was originally publiched in France in 2001. It contains the history of Internet with a focus on the ideas and utopias as formulated by "the digital generation", especially in Wired magazine in the 1990s. The conclusions and theoretical framework are not always totally clear, but what Flichy gives us is a detailed record of the story of Internet and the ideas driving it's evolution, from the hardcore scientists at Narpa to the Clinton-administrations talk of "the Information super highway" to romantics dreaming about a global brain and non-hierarchic, society-transforming communication to cyberpunk and so on. The story stops around year 2000, and someone will have to write a sequel sooner or later. Recommended to students of social science and the humanities, or anyone interested in the early history of the Internet.