Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0415911761, Paperback)

Technoculture is culture--such is the proposition posited in Technoscience and Cyberculture, arguing that technology's permeation of the cultural landscape has so irrevocably reconstituted this terrain that technology emerges as the dominant discourse in politics, medicine and everyday life.

Technoscience and Cyberculture is a collection of essays by a range of theorists committed to exploring and developing a method of cultural analysis. The problems addressed--and continuously refigured--in this collection of essays concern the ways in which technology and science relate to one another and organize, orient and effect the landscape and inhabitants of contemporary culture. Although these forces are distinguishable in varying degrees--depending on methodolgy applied--they are currently intertwined to such an extent that to critique one is to implicate the others. That is, to critique science is to recognize it as a complex object which is constituted by technology. Other relationships are similarly interconnected.

This collection is guided by several initial propositions. First, any inquiry into the practice and effects of science must involve a consideration of the actual technological systems and objects themselves. Futhermore, an investigation of current social issues--such as unemployment in the global market, violence in American culture, or the Human Genome project--must consider the deployment of various technologies in cultural institutions, whether legal, medical, media-related or religious. Finally, it must be understood that because of its exalted status in society, in the sense that it almost controls what is "true" or "universal," the role of "Big Science" is more than just one cultural practice among others. Science is not just another cultural practice or discourse, nor is technology just another set of objects. It is therefore the task of Cultural Studies and the undertaking of this volume to continuously reconstruct the way we understand technology, technoscience and cyberculture, and the inextricable links between them.

Contributors: Jody Berland, Philip Boyle, John Broughton, Bill Defazio, Manuel Delanda, Samuel Delany, Arthur Kroker, Emily Martin, Dorothy Nelkin, Steven Perella, Andrew Ross, Sharon Traweek, Ralph Trottier, Lebbeus Woods, Bettina Zolkowen.