The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet Book

In Pythagoras' Trousers, science writer and feminist Margaret Wertheim took an astute look at the social and cultural history of physics. She explored how the development of physics became intertwined with the rising power of institutionalized religion, and how both of these predominantly masculine pursuits have influenced women's ability to join the physics community. Now she has turned her attention to virtual reality, looking at similarities between how we view it today and how art and religion was viewed in medieval times. Her assertion is that rather than carrying us forward into new and fabulous other worlds, virtual reality is actually carrying us backwards--to essentially medieval dreams. Beginning with the medieval view, with its definition of the world as spiritual space, Wertheim traces the emergence of modern physics' emphasis on physical space. She then presents her thesis: that cyberspace, which is an outgrowth of modern science, posits the existence of a genuine yet immaterial world in which people are invited to commune in a nonbodily fashion, just as medieval theology brought intangible souls together in heaven. The perfect realm awaits, we are told, not behind the pearly gates but the electronic gateways labeled .com and .net. How did we get from seeing ourselves in soul space (the world of Dante and the late medievals) to seeing ourselves as purely in body space (the world of Newton and Einstein)? This crucial transition and the new shift propelled by the Internet are convincingly described in this challenging book.Read More

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  • Product Description

    Is the Internet the closest thing to heaven on earth? In our day and age cyberspace may seem an unlikely gateway for the soul. But as science commentator Margaret Wertheim argues in this bold new book, cyberspace has more and more become a repository for immense spiritual yearning. Wertheim explores the underpinnings of this mapping of spiritual desire onto digitized space and suggests that the modem today has become a metaphysical escape-hatch from a materialism that many people find increasingly unsatisfying. Proof that we are more than just the atoms of our bodies, cyberspace opens up a collective space beyond the laws of physics-a space where mind rather than matter reigns. And this strange refuge returns us to an almost medieval dualism, with a physical space of body and an immaterial space of mind and psyche. In a remarkable journey through the history of space, Wertheim traces the combined story of physical space and spiritual space from the Middle Ages to the present, and she shows how reality has come to be defined as the exclusive domain of the physical world. It is against this profoundly materialist world picture that Wertheim, with impeccable scholarship, persuades us of the appeal and the ultimate failure of cyberspace to satisfy spiritual needs.

  • 039304694X
  • 9780393046946
  • Margaret Wertheim
  • 14 April 1999
  • W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 256
  • Illustrated
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