Product Description

The Internet and Society explores the impact of the internet on modern culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #602706 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 265 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Writing a book about the Internet and Society is a bit like taking on a subject like God and the Universe. Where do you start? Slevin opts for "the acceleration of manufactured uncertainty in our late modern world"--which is a pity, because this book has short pieces on all the important issues that arise from Internet use, only they're linked together by opaque academic argument.

The reader is given an introduction to the theories of Howard Rheingold, Anthony Giddens and John B Thompson and Slevin punctuates his thesis with their ideas. The academic theory tends to burden thought-provoking discussion of the practical, like how the BP Amoco Web site affects the world of work, an analysis of how the 10 Downing Street site might change politics, and questions such as, what does having your own homepage do to your personal sense of identity?

Regulation, globalization, new forms of human association: all the thorny issues are examined and illustrated by random vignettes about people who have had long distance e-mail relationships or governments anticipating political problems with the Web. (For example, having fought off the influence of the baleful English-speaking film industry, how are the French going to deal with the Internet?) Slevin has written a book which begins to define the academic terrain for discussion of the impact of the Internet, but cyber library dust may gather quickly on this particular tome.--Brian Jenner

Review
′By far the most sophisticated historical and theoretical treatment of the Internet to appear so far, yet a real pleasure to read. Enormously comprehensive and tough minded, The Internet and Society dramatically raises the level of discussion about a phenomenon that is radically changing the way we live.′ James Lull, Professor of Communication Studies, San Jose State University, California

′Slevin sets out to challenge traditional ways of looking at the internet and he achieves this. His book is challenging and thought–provoking, and a first step towards an understanding of the cultural impact of the internet. His work is well informed and well based in previous scholarship.′ Business History

′An insightful analysis into the interplay between communication and culture.′ Sunday Tribune (Dublin)

′This book deserves much praise. Slevin provides a well reasoned and systematic account that illuminates the social situatedness and significance of the internet within contemporary society.′ Lincoln Dahlberg, Convergence

From the Author
Amsterdam, 21 March, 2000
Some friends of mine in Amsterdam recently decided to buy a new computer and get connected up to the internet. The day the computer arrived, they rearranged the chairs in their home so that they could all sit and watch. One of the first connections they made was with an elderly relative in an internet café in Vancouver. Such events reveal something about the way we live now. Getting a computer and getting online isn’t just a matter of adding on more communication technology to the ones we already have. We are living in a world of transformation, affecting almost every aspect of who we are, what we want to be, and the way we do things together. Whether we like it or not, we are being propelled into a new information environment. One in which traditional certainties can no longer be assumed. If we wish to understand the changes taking place in modern societies and in our own inner consciousness and identity, then we must recognize the central role media like the internet play in our lives and be aware of the impact they have.

Yet as internet use reshapes mediated experience for many millions of individuals and many thousands of organizations around the world, the new opportunities and burdens it helps to create remain only poorly understood. Different thinkers have taken almost completely opposite views. Sometimes rather contradictory thoughts are voiced by one and the same person. On the one hand, the internet sceptics question the exciting prospects the internet might offer and express dismal ideas about the way our world is taking shape. On the other, the internet radicals tend to be somewhat naively optimistic about the opportunities the internet brings.

I don't believe that either the sceptics or the radicals have properly understood what the internet is and how it ties in with our prospects at the beginning of a new century. In ‘The Internet and Society’, I develop a new way of understanding the internet and demonstrate how it might help us cope with the challenges of late modernity.

Most existing studies of internet culture are confined to the study of online culture, quite divorced from the real people who produced it and from the social contexts in which they are situated. The impact of the internet on modern culture, however, involves a complex set of processes. When we are online we have a foot in both worlds. Without real people and real organizations, ‘virtual communities’, ‘e-commerce’, ‘e-government’, ‘cyberspace’, etc., would simply not exist. The use of the internet is thus changing what we do and how we relate to others, both online and offline, and reordering the way in which we interpret and respond to our social world.

The most pressing challenge we all face in late modernity is how to cope with risk and uncertainty. The internet has not come about by accident at this moment time. For better or worse, the internet is deeply associated with the introduction of new sources of risk and uncertainty into our lives. First, it allows distant and local happenings to interlace with each other on an unprecedented scale. Second, it allows us to gather and circulate knowledge that challenges the continuity of our ideas and the way we go about doing things. Third, it gives many of us access to vasts amount of information which we cannot always relate to the practical contexts in which we live. Moreover, a great deal of the world population is excluded from the internet altogether.

Existing studies of internet culture do little to help us embrace such risk and uncertainty positively. The consequences of the internet are often seen either as the result of individual choices or as preceding all choice. However, when we use the internet, we cannot make whatever we wish of it, nor are we subject to forces that operate exclusively behind our backs. The impact of the internet comes about as a result of the tensionful pushing and pulling of real people and real organizations often situated in very different technical and social conditions. When we use the internet we do so as intelligent agents and are capable of knowing a great deal about the properties of this medium and about the limitations and opportunities created by the contexts in which we deploy it.

The internet may well impoverish certain aspects of our lives and contribute to the riskiness of our world and it is important to draw attention to this. But internet use also interacts with attempts at furthering an alternative approach to the management of risk. Both on the level of world society, organizations and institutions, and on the level of personal life we are using the internet to negotiate the transformations of our time.

Throughout the book I relate my analysis of the internet to a variety of substantive examples of internet use from around the world. I set out and redefine the tasks for further study.

The Internet and Society:

Features a wide-ranging introduction to the internet and its significance in modern culture and society

Develops an original argument about the nature of the internet which blends social theory, communications analysis and a variety of case studies

Links the impact of the internet to central debates and concepts concerning manufactured risk, reflexive modernization, organizational renewal, community, self-formation, publicness and globalization

Offers an author maintained website that helps you find internet sources used in the book and other relevant material

Readership:

Second-year undergraduates and above in media and communications studies, business and management studies, politics, cultural studies, sociology and social theory and students and academics across the social sciences who are interested in the impact of new communication technologies.

Thank you for your interest in my book,

James Slevin, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Customer Reviews

Certainly a good book about The Net !
Good books about the Internet are rare, but Slevin's book is certainly one of them. It approaches the Internet from a social point of view, and describes the Net as a completely new medium, which covers aspects of all other existing media, and which, being so varied, has some major advantages over single, separate media (like newspapers or television). As Slevin argues, the Internet differs from a single, separate medium in that it does not merely have a push role, but can give people so much information as to make a real difference and a huge impact on society. Slevin might, as such, have named his book 'Internet is Society' rather than 'Internet and Society'.

The book is a good introduction to the origins and definitions of the Internet. It describes how young people basically grow up with the medium and how other people are spending more and more time and money to explore the Net. The book also deals with the Internet's possibilities and, not unimportantly, with the risks that are involved. These risks being a hot issue in society at the moment (risk management in organizations), Slevin's book provides some new insights into handling the Internet, both online as well as offline. So the book is a kind of a SWOT analysis of the Net and I am very impressed by this book!

René Kalsbeek M.A.Communication Studies, University of Amsterdam

Technology's impact much broader than "online culture"
As a doctoral student in Mass Communcation at the University of Texas in Austin studying the social impact of the Internet, I was glad to find a text that discussed the Internet from a social and cultural perspective. It was so refreshing to find that someone recognizes that the impacts of technology are broader than just the "online culture."

I was also inspired by Dr. Slevin's active approach recommendation to technology, rather than the passive approach or wait-and-see approach, or the technozealot/technophobe approaches that are prevalent in current literature. I, too, feel that the impact will be the sum total of various pros, cons and indifferences of the medium and that only through a coherent study of technology and an analysis of communication and sociological theory will we be able to grasp its opportunities and consequences. I plan to refer to this book and the resources on the associated Web site as a key resource in my dissertation process.

The focus on the arguments of Giddens, Thompson and Baumann strengthened the position of the author and grounded the work in sociological theory. Slevin realizes that we must not assume that traditional theory will apply in this new medium, but that we must analyze existing theory and understand that the unique dynamics of the Internet might modify or even rewrite theory. This work is powerful and insightful in its ability to integrate and apply multiple perspectives. I only wish that I could have written this book myself!

A remarkable, insightful and well written book
James Slevin shows tremendous scholarly accomplishment in this timely book. It is rich in detail which he connects up excellently to sophisticated social theory.