Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication
by M. Christine Boyer

Urban historian M. Christine Boyer turns to the new frontier - cybercities - in this compelling new book. Boyer argues that the computer is to contemporary society what the machine was to modernism, and that this new metaphor profoundly affects the way we think, imagine, and ultimately grasp reality. But there is, she believes, an inherent danger here; that as cyberspace pulls us into its electronic grasp, we withdraw from the world. Transferred, plugged in, and down-loaded, reality becomes increasingly immaterial. Frozen to one side of our terminal's screen, Boyer concludes, we risk becoming incapable of action in a real city plagued by crime, hatred, disease, unemployment, and under-education. In a series of polemical essays, Boyer examines cyberspace, virtual reality, disembodiment, and cyborgs, drawing on a wide range of sources from Walter Benjamin to William Gibson. In the end, Boyer issues a clarion call to reinstall a social agenda in the midst of these technological innovations.