Techno-Utopia/ Techno-Dystopia: Writing the Future of Cyber-Technology
Institution: | University of Waterloo |
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Department: | |
Year: | 2015 |
Keywords: | Cyber-cultures, Virtual Reality, Online Mythology, Cyborg Anthropology |
Record ID: | 2061012 |
Full text PDF: | http://hdl.handle.net/10012/9058 |
Will cyberspace ever become truly inhabitable, and if so, what kind of political climate will be present there? By investigating emergent discourses surrounding the future of cyber-technology, I reveal how online users are actively engaged in the preemptive literary construction and interpretation of a not yet realized cosmopolitics of virtual spaces. Additionally, I argue that futurism online constitutes the emergence of a novel form of real-time genre fiction intertextually linked to more conventional forms of science fiction that interpenetrate both public and academic discourses and interpret cyberspace as a potential source of either boundless freedom or dystopia.