The War Of The Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-tech Assault on Reality: The Assault on Reality

by Mark Z. Slouka (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $8.26

  The 20th century has been simultaneously the most creative and the most destructive in history. An example of this dichotomy is the world of artificial reality - an area of technological innovation which may threaten damaging consequences. Cyberspace, virtual reality and image manipulation have made substitute realities and electronically generated places more sophisticated and more real . But as the technology develops further, the real (ie physical) world may become more unreal. What are the implications of this for our society, our culture and possibly even our sanity?

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.25

  Mark Z. Slouka argues that the perception of reality in America has been radically altered by the emergence of new technologies. The notion of reality as an empirical shared state of existence has been particularly challenged by a revolution in the virtual technologies spawned by the computer industry. What is real in a society infiltrated by technologies which manipulate images, which replace the written word and which offer entire alternative cyberspace communities accessible only through the window of a computer screen? Slouka claims that reality itself is under siege and that, in particular, the cyberspace revolution has all the potency of a new religion - a cult which is eager to replace this world and its mundane grubbiness with a mathematically pure and clinically correct heaven .