The internet has recently grown from a fringe cultural phenomenon to a significant site of cultural production and transformation. Internet Culture maps this new domain of language, politics and identity, locating it within the histories of communication and the public sphere. Internet Culture offers a critical interrogation of the sustaining myths of the virtual world and of the implications of the current mass migration onto the electronic frontier. Among the topics discussed in Internet Culture are the virtual spaces and places created by the citizens of the Net and their claims to the hotly contested notion of "virtual community"; the virtual bodies that occupy such spaces; and the desires that animate these bodies. The contributors also examine the communication medium behind theworlds of the Net, analyzing the rhetorical conventions governing online discussion, literary antecedents,and potential pedagogical applications.

The internet has recently grown from a fringe cultural phenomenon to a significant site of cultural production and transformation. Internet Culture maps this new domain of language, politics and identity, locating it within the histories of communication and the public sphere. Internet Culture offers a critical interrogation of the sustaining myths of the virtual world and of the implications of the current mass migration onto the electronic frontier. Among the topics discussed in Internet Culture are the virtual spaces and places created by the citizens of the Net and their claims to the hotly contested notion of "virtual community"; the virtual bodies that occupy such spaces; and the desires that animate these bodies. The contributors also examine the communication medium behind theworlds of the Net, analyzing the rhetorical conventions governing online discussion, literary antecedents,and potential pedagogical applications.

Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture. In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

“This is the most culturally sophisticated history of the Internet yet written. We can’t make sense of what the Internet means in our lives without reading Schulte’s elegant account of what the Internet has meant at various points in the past 30 years.”—Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chair of the Department of Media Studies at The University of Virginia In the 1980s and 1990s, the internet became a major player in the global economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one another, to share their lives, and to spend their time—shopping, working, learning, and even taking political or social action. Policymakers and news media attempted—and often struggled—to make sense of the emergence and expansion of this new technology. They imagined the internet in conflicting terms: as a toy for teenagers, a national security threat, a new democratic frontier, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework for promoting globalization and revolution. Schulte maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and helped shape not just our sense of the internet, but the development of the technology itself. Cached focuses on how people imagine and relate to technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that produced the internet as a core technology able to revise economics, politics, and culture, as well as to alter lived experience. Schulte illustrates the conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and policy combined to produce this transformative technology. Stephanie Ricker Schulte is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas. In the Critical Cultural Communication series

Female scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians worldwide are making historic contributions to their fields. The modern workforce is closer to gender-equal than it has ever been, and many efforts are in place to support further progress. The Internet of Women provides an exciting look at personal narratives and case studies of female leaders and cultural shifts around the globe that illustrate this promising trend. From the United Nations' emphasis on girls and technology education in the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) to the increased female labor force in Zambia, a policy change that was inspired by the MDGs (UN Millennial Development Goals), The Internet of Women captures stunning examples of progress from around the world and men working hand in hand with women advocating for cultural change. Scholars and practitioners lament the lack of women leading and working in leading organizations in the technology industry. Gender equality and female participation in the tech field is critical to both developing and developed economies; nevertheless, this gap remains a global phenomenon. The lack of female leadership is particularly extreme at the highest echelons of leading technology organizations. Few publicly traded tech companies have female CEOs - in fact, most nations have zero female leadership in the tech industry. This gap does indicate a slow pace of progress for gender equality in tech employment. Women's pay still lags nearly a decade behind, according to the World Economic Forum, meaning that women's on average pay today is the equivalent to that of similarly qualified and similarly employed men in 2006. Without significant progress, the current rate of change will not lead to parity for 118 years, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). However there's significant work being done to shift this tide. Take for instance Michelle Lee, the first female Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), reflects on her childhood Girl Scout badge in sewing and cooking and how that memory inspired to create an IP badge that exposes young women to the process of invention. Social entrepreneur, investor, and Malala Fund co-founder Shiza Shahid shares her efforts beginning from mentoring young women in Pakistan to her current work directing more investment to women innovators around the globe. And Elizabeth Isele, a senior fellow in Social Innovation at Babson College, shares her research on women and ageism saying we need to retire the word retirement. The book is divided into six parts, each with unique areas of focus:• Millennials Leading: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities Facing the Next Generation of Women in Technology• Men and Women Empowering One Another• Bold Leadership: Women Changing the Culture of Investment and Entrepreneurship• Educating for the 21st Century• Breaking the Glass Ceiling: A Generation of Women Forging into Technology Leadership• Emerging Fields of TechnologyThe Internet of Women gathers examples about the increasingly inclusive and progressive gender culture in technology from over 30 countries. Stories range from an entrepreneur in Dubai partnering with private and public sector entities to accelerate blockchain technology to a young British woman moving to Silicon Valley to launch an artificial intelligence platform and incubator. The book is intended for corporations, academic institutions, the private sector, government agencies, gender experts, and the general public, and its key benefit is to let the reader understand a path towards implementing diversity overall globally. It also showcases the strategies, tools, and tactical execution on how create cultural change in all parts of the world.

Using clear, readable prose, conceptual artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s manifesto shows how our time on the internet is not really wasted but is quite productive and creative as he puts the experience in its proper theoretical and philosophical context. Kenneth Goldsmith wants you to rethink the internet. Many people feel guilty after spending hours watching cat videos or clicking link after link after link. But Goldsmith sees that “wasted” time differently. Unlike old media, the internet demands active engagement—and it’s actually making us more social, more creative, even more productive. When Goldsmith, a renowned conceptual artist and poet, introduced a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet”, he nearly broke the internet. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Vice, Time, CNN, the Telegraph, and many more, ran articles expressing their shock, dismay, and, ultimately, their curiosity. Goldsmith’s ideas struck a nerve, because they are brilliantly subversive—and endlessly shareable. In Wasting Time on the Internet, Goldsmith expands upon his provocative insights, contending that our digital lives are remaking human experience. When we’re “wasting time,” we’re actually creating a culture of collaboration. We’re reading and writing more—and quite differently. And we’re turning concepts of authority and authenticity upside-down. The internet puts us in a state between deep focus and subconscious flow, a state that Goldsmith argues is ideal for creativity. Where that creativity takes us will be one of the stories of the twenty-first century. Wide-ranging, counterintuitive, engrossing, unpredictable—like the internet itself—Wasting Time on the Internet is the manifesto you didn’t know you needed.

This study examines the dynamics of critical Internet culture after the medium opened to a broader audience in the mid 1990s. It is Geert Lovink's PhD thesis, submitted late 2002, written in between his two books on the same topic: Dark Fiber (2002) and My First Recession (2003). The core of the research consists of four case studies of non-profit networks: the Amsterdam community provider, The Digital City (DDS); the early years of the nettime mailinglist community; a history of the European new media arts network Syndicate; and an analysis of the streaming media network Xchange. The research describes the search for sustainable community network models in a climate of hyper growth and increased tensions and conflict concerning moderation and ownership of online communities.

New information technologies have, to an unprecedented degree, come to reshape human relations, identities and communities both online and offline. As Internet narratives including online fiction, poetry and films reflect and represent ambivalent politics in China, the Chinese state wishes to enable the formidable soft power of this new medium whilst at the same time handling the ideological uncertainties it inevitably entails. This book investigates the ways in which class, gender, ethnicity and ethics are reconfigured, complicated and enriched by the closely intertwined online and offline realities in China. It combs through a wide range of theories on Internet culture, intellectual history, and literary, film, and cultural studies, and explores a variety of online cultural materials, including digitized spoofing, microblog fictions, micro-films, online fictions, web dramas, photographs, flash mobs, popular literature and films. These materials have played an important role in shaping the contemporary cultural scene, but have so far received little critical attention. Here, the authors demonstrate how Chinese Internet culture has provided a means to intervene in the otherwise monolithic narratives of identity and community. Offering an important contribution to the rapidly growing field of Internet studies, this book will also be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture, literary and film studies, media and communication studies, and Chinese society.

Public Internet discussion forums offer opportunities for intercultural interaction in many languages on a vast range of topics, but are often overlooked by language educators in favour of purpose-built exchanges between learners. The book investigates this untapped pedagogical potential.

This volume provides a means of foregrounding new questions, methods, and theories which can be applied to digital media, platforms, and infrastructures. These inquiries include, among others, how representation to hardware, software, computer code, and infrastructures might be implicated in global economic, political, and social systems of control.