This book is an ethnographic investigation which follows Cybermind members in their daily lives on the List, and explores the ways they look at the world, argue, relate online life to offline life, use gender, and build community. Perhaps the most comprehensive history of an Internet group ever published, it includes detailed analyses using List members' own words and commentary, and develops a unique theory of the relationship between culture, the problems of communication, and the ongoing processes of categorisation. Living on Cybermind illustrates how behaviour is affected by the organisation of communication, and how people deal with the paradoxes involved in resolving ambiguity and truth in a situation in which presence is always on the verge of slipping away.
Jonathan Paul Marshall has an M.A. (Hons) and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Sydney. He has been an Australian Research Council Research Fellow at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, working on a project on online gender. He is now a QE II fellow at UTS working on the relationship between Information Technology and disorder.
Youth Online chronicles the stories of young people from several countries - the US, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and Holland - and their interactions in online communities over a seven-year period. It examines how young people construct their identities in various social contexts: social, fantasy, role-playing; and for various social purposes: leadership, learning, power, rebellion and romance. It explores the ways youth are deploying both visual and literary cues to develop a full sense of presence online and to effectively communicate with their peers. Using methods of textual, visual, and socio-psychological analysis, this book illuminates the ways in which young people are making sense of their own identities and their place within broader communities.
Angela Thomas is Lecturer in English Education at the University of Sydney. She specializes in teaching new media literacies and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on fan fiction, online role-playing, blogging, digital fiction, cyberculture, identity, and learning in virtual worlds, and is co-author of Children's Literature and Computer-Based Teaching.