How do digital media technologies affect society and our lives? Through the cultural theory hypotheses of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and posthumanism, Alan N. Shapiro investigates the social impact of Virtual/Augmented Reality, AI, social media platforms, robots, and the Brain-Computer Interface. His examination of concepts of Jean Baudrillard and Katherine Hayles, as well as films such as Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina, and the TV series Black Mirror, suggests that the boundary between science fiction narratives and the »real world« has become indistinct. Science-fictional thinking should be advanced as a principal mode of knowledge for grasping the world and digitalization.

Fictional narratives produced in Latin America often borrow tropes from contemporary science fiction to examine the shifts in the nature of power in neoliberal society. King examines how this leads towards a market-governed control society and also explores new models of agency beyond that of the individual.

The Cyborg Caribbean examines a wide range of twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, arguing that authors from Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagan-Velez, and Vagabond Beaumont to Yasmin Silvia Portales, Erick Mota, and Yoss, Haris Durrani, and Rita Indiana Hernandez, among others, negotiate rhetorical legacies of historical techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. The authors span the Hispanic Caribbean and their respective diasporas, reflecting how science fiction as a genre has the ability to manipulate political borders. As both a literary and historical study, the book traces four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy, nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed understandings of corporality and humanity in the Caribbean. By recognizing the ways that increased technology may amplify the marginalization of bodies based on race, gender, sexuality, and other factors, the science fiction texts studied in this book challenge oppressive narratives that link technological and sociopolitical progress. .

Serial storytelling has the advantage of unlocking rather than simplifying the complexities of digital culture. With their worldbuilding potential, TV series open up new artistic horizons, particularly for the dystopian genre. Situated at the nexus of dystopia, complex TV, and a metamodern cultural logic, Dystopia on Demand: Technology, Digital Culture, and the Metamodern Quest in Complex Serial Dystopias offers readers novel insights into the dynamics of serial dystopias in the contemporary streaming landscape. Introducing the term 'complex serial dystopias' to describe series that allow audiences to engage with the dystopian premise from multiple angles, the book examines four Anglo-American series, including Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Westworld, and Kiss Me First. The in-depth analyses trace the variety of ways in which these series offer critical reflections on the human-technology entanglement in digital culture.

Virtual Identities and Digital Culture investigates how our online identities and cultures are embedded within the digital practices of our lives, exploring how we form community, how we play, and how we re-imagine traditional media in a digital world. The collection explores a wide range of digital topics – from dating apps, microcelebrity, and hackers to auditory experiences, Netflix algorithms, and live theatre online – and builds on existing work in digital culture and identity by bringing new voices, contemporary examples, and highlighting platforms that are emerging in the field. The book speaks to the modern reality of how our digital lives have been forever altered by our transnational experiences – one of those key experiences is the pandemic, but so too is systemic inequality, questions of digital privacy, and the role of joy in our online lives. A vital contribution at a time of significant social and cultural flux, this book will be highly relevant to those studying digital culture within media, communication, cultural studies, digital humanities, and sociology departments.

Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how texts, images, and sounds are made different when they are mediated by information machines, how this difference affects individuals as well as social and political formations, and how it creates opportunities for progressive change. Poster’s critique develops through a series of lively studies. Analyzing the appearance of Sesame Street’s Bert next to Osama Bin Laden in a New York Times news photo, he examines the political repercussions of this Internet “hoax” as well as the unlimited opportunities that Internet technology presents for the appropriation and alteration of information. He considers the implications of open-source licensing agreements, online personas, the sudden rise of and interest in identity theft, peer-to-peer file sharing, and more. Focusing explicitly on theory, he reflects on the limitations of critical concepts developed before the emergence of new media, particularly globally networked digital communications, and he argues that, contrary to the assertions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, new media do not necessarily reproduce neoimperialisms. Urging a rethinking of assumptions ingrained during the dominance of broadcast media, Poster charts new directions for work on politics and digital culture.

The subjects of this book constitute a significant cross section of BBC science fiction television. With such characters as the Doctor (an enigmatic time-traveling alien), Kerr Avon (a problematic rebel leader), Dave Lister (a slovenly last surviving human) and Captain Jack Harkness (a complex omnisexual immortal), these shows have both challenged and reinforced viewer expectations about the small-screen masculine hero. This book explores the construction of gendered heroic identity in the series from both production and fan perspectives. The paradoxical relationships between the producers, writers and fans of the four series are discussed. Fan fiction, criticism and videos are examined that both celebrate and criticize BBC science fiction heroes and villains.

Cyberpop is an analysis of cyberculture and its popular cultural productions. The study begins with a Foucaultian model of cyberculture as a discursive formation, and explains how some key concepts (such as 'virtuality,' 'speed,' and 'Connectivity') operate as a conceptual architecture network linking technologies to information and individual subjects. The chapters then each focus on a particular cyberfiguration, including Hollywood films (GATTACA,The Matrix), popular literature (William Gibson's Neuromancer, Scott Westerfeld's Polymorph), advertising for digital products and services (Apple Computer's '1984/McIntosh' campaign, AT&T's 'mLife' campaign), digital artworks (including virtual females such as Motorola's 'Mya' and Elite Modeling Agency's 'Webbie Tookay,' and work by visual artist Daniel Lee for Microsoft's 'Evolution' campaign), and video games (TombRaider). Each close reading illustrates the ways in which representations of digital lifestyles and identities - which typically fetishize computers and celebrate a 'high tech' aesthetic encourage participation in digital capitalism and commodity cyberculture. Matrix argues that popular representations of cyberculture often function as forms of social criticism that creatively inspire audiences to 'think different' (in the words of Mac advertising) about the consequences of the digitalization of everyday life.

There is a broad consensus that digital narrative is "spatial," but what this critical term means and how it is used varies greatly depending on the discipline from which it is approached. Digital Narrative Spaces brings together essays by prominent scholars in electronic literature and other forms of digital authorship to explore the relationship between story and space across these disciplines. This volume includes an introduction with Marie-Laure Ryan’s typology of space, followed by thought-provoking individual chapters which explore innovative explorations of electronic literature, locative media, literary tourism, and the mapping of real-world literary spaces. The collection closes with an essay analyzing continuities and discontinuities in theory of space across the chapters. This volume will provide an important framework for establishing a dialogue across disciplines and future scholarship in these fields.