Table of Contents

1: Steve Woolgar: Introduction: Five Rules of Virtuality
2: Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas, and Tiziana Terranova: They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualizing Use and Non-use of the Internet
3: G. M. Peter Swann and Tim P. Watts: Visualization Needs Vision: The Pre-paradigmatic Character of Virtual Reality
4: Susan E. Watt, Martin Lea, and Russell Spears: How Social is Internet Communication? A Reappraisal of Bandwidth and Anonymity Effects
5: Sonia Liff, Fred Steward, and Peter Watts: New Public Places for Internet Access: Networks for Practice-Based Learning and Social Inclusion
6: David Knights, Faith Noble, Theo Vurdubakis, and Hugh Willmott: Allegories of Creative Destruction: Technology and Organization in Narratives of the e-Economy
7: Brian McGrail: Confronting Electronic Surveillance: Desiring and Resisting New Technologies
8: David Mason, Graham Button, Gloria Lankshear, and Sally Coates: Getting Real about Surveillance and Privacy at Work
9: Charles Crook and Paul Light: Virtual Society and the Cultural Practice of Study
10: Sarah Nettleton, Nicholas Pleace, Roger Burrows, Steven Muncer, and Brian Loader: The Reality of Virtual Social Support
11: Andreas Wittel, Celia Lury, and Scott Lash: Real and Virtual Connectivity: New Media in London
12: Steven D. Brown and Geoffrey Lightfoot: Presence, Absence, and Accountability: Email and the Mediation of Organizational Memory
13: Melvin Pollner: Inside the Bubble: Communion, Cognition, and Deep Play at the Intersection of Wall Street and Cyberspace
14: John Hughes, Mark Rouncefield, and Pete Tolmie: The Day-to-Day Work of Standardization: A Sceptical Note on the Reliance on IT in a Retail Bank
15: Jon Agar, Sarah Green, and Penny Harvey: Cotton to Computers: From Industrial to Information Revolutions
16: Geoff Cooper, Nicola Green, Richard Harper, and Gerald Murtagh: Mobile Society? Technology, Distance, and Presence
17: Marilyn Strathern: Abstraction and Decontextualization: An Anthropological Comment

About the Author

Steve Woolgar was Professor of Sociology, Head of the Department of Human Sciences, and Director of CRICT (Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology) until 2000. He has held visiting appointments at McGill University, MIT, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, Paris, and University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship, and the winner of an ESRC Senior Reseach Fellowship. He
moved to the University of Oxford in autumn 2000 to take up the Chair of Marketing at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is currently Director of the ESRC' Virtual Society?' programme.

Reviews

... intelligent, well-grounded and carefully drawn insights into the take up and use of ICTs ... intriguing case studies ... Throughout, Woolgar's book provides concrete sociological evidence to justify the question mark in the title. European Journal of Communication This work shows social scientists seriously getting to grips with the complexitites of the social implications of electronic technologies. It should also be read widely beyond this community, stimulating dialogue with others working in the area, such as industry practitioners, government planners, and academics from other disciplines and societies. Geoff Walsham, Professor of Management Studies, Judge Institute, University of Cambridge This stunning volume is obligatory reading for all those studying "cyberspace" and its contents and discontents. It is one of the first deep empirical studies of this scope analyzing the changes occasioned by the widespread development of networked information technologies. A subtle, intertwined scholarly effort, this book is a landmark achievement, marking the maturity of social studies of computing and IT. Susan Leigh Star, Professor Of Communication, University of California at San Diego From Woolgar's "five rules of virtuality" to Pollner's delightful account of his adventures as a dot com investor, this challenging collection will be essential reading for all of those interested in the social relations of the new information technologies. Donald MacKenzie, Professor of Sociology, Edinburgh University; Author of Inventing Accuracy This book shows the essential contribution of social sciences to the understanding of the network society, our society. Based on scholarly research, it provides a rigorous account of the diverse effects of information and communication technologies on the social fabric of our lives. It is a great antidote against mythologies and media hype on this critical subject matter. Manuel Castells, Professor of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley