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Review

"This thoughtful and ambitious book offers an interpretive framework for cyberspace that steps outside the simplistic utopian and dystopian camps." Sheryl N. Hamilton, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University "This is an important book that may well initiate the next phase of growth in media ecology extending and refining Innis and McLuhan." Stuart Moulthrop, Information Arts and Technologies, University of Baltimore "Downes addresses subjects such as immersion, presence, interactivity, virtual spaces and communities...The arguments in the debate are carefully examined, offering the reader balanced and multiple positions on the subjects. The contextualization of the debates and theoretical constructions is precise and developed in different levels, from the most abstract socio-philosophical level to the debates pertinent to cyberculture and information technologies...the quality of the theoretical constructions is impeccable, offering to the reader new insights to the existent bibliography and a solid basis to the arguments in favour of the method proposed."-Yara Mitsuishi, RCCS, March 09

Description

It is commonplace in our digitized world to think that technology is the primary agent of psychological and social change. In "Interactive Realism" Daniel Downes argues that it continues to be people who construct social reality through their interactions, critiquing the "tranformative turn" in media studies. Distinguishing between the Internet, a communication system, and cyberspace, an environment for human exchange, the author provides a framework for exploring the metaphors and images used in cyberspace to represent and model social reality. He clarifies how these symbolic interactions are linked to the technologies used to create, store, and transmit them and to their social context.Drawing on examples from digital games, web design, film, and photography, the author shows how individual experiences are calibrated by technology and how digital communication contributes to broader processes such as community building and public memory. Downes articulates a nuanced form of media ecology that does not focus on a single cause of change but rather on the relationships between embodied experience, communication systems, and representations. "Interactive Realism" establishes a new method for understanding the importance of digital media to the construction of social reality.