Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

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The new mobilities paradigm.

How we Think

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries

We would like to take this chance to welcome readers to this new journal and sketch out some of its aims at what we think is an exciting and challenging time for work on tourism.The main impetus for founding a new tourism journal was that in our view and in the minds of many key contributors to the tourism field, tourism studies had become stale, tired, repetitive and lifeless. At a time when John Urry has just launched his Sociology Beyond Societies ‐ Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (in which mobilities are argued to have ‘reconstituted social life in uneven and complex ways’); when Anthony Giddens’ 1999 Reith Lectures were called ‘Runaway World’ and when the subject of the 2000 Theory Culture & Society conference in Finland was cosmopolitanism, it seems almost impossible not to see tourist studies as one of the most exciting and relevant topics in these transnational times (Urry, 2000; Giddens, 2000).And yet, it is not. The first trouble with tourism studies, and paradoxically also one of its sources of interest, is that its research object, ‘tourism’ has grown very dramatically and quickly and that the tourism research community is relatively new. Indeed at times it has been unclear which was growing more rapidly ‐ tourism or tourism research. Part of this trouble is that tourist studies has simply tried to track and record this staggering expansion, producing an enormous record of instances, case studies and variations. One reason for this is that tourist studies has been dominated by policy led and industry sponsored work so the analysis tends to internalize industry led priorities and perspectives, leaving the . . . research subject to the imperatives of policy, in the sense that one expects the researcher to assume as his own an objective of social control that will allow the tourist product to be more finely tuned to the demands of the international market. (Picard, 1996: 103) Part of this trouble is also that this effort has been made by people whose disciplinary origins do not include the tools necessary to analyse and theorize the complex cultural and social processes that have unfolded. How many schools of tourism hire the specialist skills of social and cultural theory? Most tourist studies © 2001 sage publications

The trouble with tourism and travel theory

The concept of the circular economy has gained increasing prominence in academic, practitioner and policy circles and is linked to greening economies and sustainable development. However, the idea is more often celebrated than critically interrogated. Analysis shows the concept circulates as an idea and ideal, exemplified by industrial symbiosis and extended product life. Yet, its actual enactment is limited and fragile. Instead, circular economies are achieved mostly through global recycling networks which are the primary means by which wastes are recovered as resources. European policies eschew these circuits. Resource recovery through global recycling networks is regarded as a dirty and illegal trade. In its place, EU circular economies attempt to transform wastes into resources within the boundaries of the EU. Through an analysis of two case studies of resource recovery in the United Kingdom, we highlight the challenges that confront making circular economies within the EU, showing that these ...

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Interrogating the circular economy: the moral economy of resource recovery in the EU

This paper follows the case of one city that has deliberately fashioned itself as a regional, indeed global, hub for the information age. Singapore has shaped itself into a global hub in what is often seen as a global information space that depends upon key. The state conceived of the island’s development through a vocabulary of networks and hubs in a space of global flows. This paper follows the Singapore government’s efforts to embrace the new possibilities of being a global hub while coping with the ramifications of changing social and spatial relationships at a range of scales from the local to the global. The paper focuses upon the initiative to create a so-called Intelligent Island and the SingaporeONE project to create a pervasive networked environment. These two linked initiatives aimed to allow Singaporeans to exploit digital technology but also reconfigured the relationship of Singapore to the outside world. The paper will examine the material and discursive consequences of these plans – suggesting that the rhetorical and discursive effects are probably as significant as many of the alleged benefits through information processing. These initiatives are set in the context of a range of other flows – of people and things – to raise issues about the city state as, on the one hand, a purposive actors shaping the environment and, on the other, being pushed by forces that destabilise the linkage of people and place upon which the state relied.

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Qualitative methods: touchy, feely, look-see?:

Geographers have shown the centrality of representations of landscape to understanding social geographies. This article suggests that so far more attention has been paid to the representations than...

Mike Crang

Papers

Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries

The trouble with tourism and travel theory

Interrogating the circular economy: the moral economy of resource recovery in the EU

Qualitative methods: touchy, feely, look-see?:

Picturing practices: research through the tourist gaze