The Network Society is now more than ever the essential guide to the past, consequences and future of digital communication. Fully revised, this Third Edition covers crucial new issues and updates. This book remains an accessible, comprehensive, must-read introduction to how new media function in contemporary society.

The network society

Since the term 'cyborg' first emerged in the early 1960s it has gradually evolved to encompass an ever wider array of fields ranging from in vitro fertilization to science fiction cinema. In this article the idea of the cyborg will be explored in relation to the physical infrastructure of the city. It is suggested that the cyborg metaphor usefully challenges dualistic conceptions of urban space that revolve around antinomies such as nature/culture, body/technology, real/unreal and concrete/abstract. A cyborg perspective highlights complexity, hybridity and indeterminacy and emphasizes facets of the urban experience that remain extensively hidden in conventional accounts. Yet the cyborg concept also extends to functionalist, neo-orgamcist and technologically determinist approaches in which the role of flows, networks or biomorphic patterns takes precedence over the political dynamics of urban space. This article develops an alternative reading of the cyborg based around the need to rethink relations between the corporeality of the urban experience and the continuing political salience of the public realm.

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Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City

Geographers have shown the centrality of representations of landscape to understanding social geographies. This article suggests that so far more attention has been paid to the representations than...

Picturing practices: research through the tourist gaze

The new mobile wireless computer technologies and social media applications using Web 2.0 platforms have recently received attention from those working in health promotion as a promising new way of achieving their goals of preventing ill-health and promoting healthy behaviours at the population level. There is very little critical examination in this literature of how the use of these digital technologies may affect the targeted groups, in terms of the implications for how individuals experience embodiment, selfhood and social relationships. This article addresses these issues, employing a range of social and cultural theories to do so. It is argued that m-health technologies produce a digital cyborg body. They are able to act not only as prostheses, but also as interpreters of the body. The subject produced through the use of m-health technologies is constructed as both an object of surveillance and persuasion, and as a responsible citizen who is willing and able to act on the health imperatives issuing forth from the technologies and to present their body/self as open to continual measurement and assessment. The implications of this new way of monitoring and regulating health are discussed.

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M-health and health promotion: The digital cyborg and surveillance society

Emile Durkheim His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study

Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg:

Encounters in intercultural space transcultural space parasites and open circuits of trees and men technologies of representation transcultural space and transcultural beings imaginary geographies and beyond sound and intercultural contact spaces traumatic photographs boundary phenomena, transcultural space.

Transcultural space and transcultural beings

This paper will explore a number of questions concerning a cultural model for photography. It will present a model for a photographic ritual based on a correspondence between the process of producing photographs and a social and cultural process known as the 'rites of passage'. In this context, it will specifically address the means by which a ritual of photography would serve to mediate the individual and collective domains of cultural experience — in particular, for whom and in what terms this type of process may be understood to operate. The paper will begin with a general discussion of reflexivity, performance, and ritual. It will then briefly outline Durkheim's notion of 'collective representation'. This will be followed by an outline of the structural and processual functions of the rites of passage. After this overview of the general theoretical context, a synopsis will be given of photography's position within a progressive rationalization of sight; this will be followed by a sketch of the formal relationship between the photographic camera and the human eye. A ritual model of the 'photographic process', and^a more specific discussion of the classification system in terms of which it operates, will then be given. This will serve as a context for a discussion of the relationship between it, the camera, the human eye, and the role of the photographer. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the relationship between this type of ritual, an education of the eye, and an anthropology of sight.

Toward an anthropology of sight: Ritual performance and the photographic process

In 1908 Arnold Van Gennep published his now classic The Rites of Passage. The book proposed a unifying theory for a certain class of ceremonial rituals. These rituals that accompany a person's or group's 'life crises' or social transitions were termed by Van Gennep 'rites of passage'. Some examples of such rites are birth, puberty, marriage, and death, and more generally the movement from one social category to another. According to the theory, these rites are characterized by three successive and distinct moments in 'ritual time'. These moments provide a symbolic bridge that permits the transformation or transposition of the subject from one social category to another and they simultaneously buffer the existing social fabric from the consequences of these crises. The rites function to recognize these abnormal conditions and thus to integrate the abnormal into a normally recognized sequence of social activities. Based on a diagram by Edmund Leach (1976: 78), these rites can be presented as in Figure 1. The first transition is the rite of separation. It is constituted by the symbolic behavior signifying the transition from the secular and profane world of the social group to an abnormal and therefore sacred condition opposite from, and contradictory to, the common set of cultural conditions providing for social cohesion. This second transition or period of transformation, the bridge between the subject or group's previous and subsequent status, is the period of ritual metamorphosis. The conditions of this stage are opposite from and therefore sacred, dangerous, and unclean when compared with normal social conditions. Not only is it metaphysically abnormal, but also the territory or location on which the transformation takes place is sacred and outside of society. Victor Turner (1972) has termed this stage 'betwixt and between', neither one nor the other, a state of nonbeing, death, or nothingness. In this marginal state the subject or subjects are considered to possess little of their former or later attributes. When the desired symbolic transformation has taken

The ritual of photography

Since 1839, Western culture has conditioned its constituents to see in terms of photographic images. That conditioning, however, has not been homogeneous. One has only to examine the discourses that permeate photography to become aware of the fissures continually disrupting its practice. Thus, one of the principal dichotomies that continues to influence the historical, practical, and critical debate on the nature of photography involves its 'objective' vs. its 'subjective' foundations. Is photography to be considered a scientific or an artistic tool? Are photographs factual or are they particularly complex fictions? As the history of these debates reveals, the answers to these questions are relative to the practical uses and the discursive formations instrumental to photographic activity. There is, however, another position which can be adopted in relation to photography's historico-epistemological identity that has not yet been surveyed. This position can be identified through an exploration of an alternative culture delineated with reference to photography's modes of production. A culture of photography does not necessarily have to be defined in terms of the images that have come to embody much of its current historical and social value. Photography's historico-epistemological identity can also be defined in terms of the cultural dimensions of its process of production-after all, photographs do not simply appear; they are produced by a complex transformational process which might also be impregnated with symbolic value. In the following discussion, an alternative postphotographic practice will be described, and its strategic and practical consequences will be considered. This photographic 'counter-practice' will be introduced by an examination of a correspondence between a visual classification system and the cultural priorities expressed by the Judaeo-Christian myth of origins as presented in the first ten verses of Genesis. This correspondence will then provide a point of departure for exposing the authorial and deterministic foundations of all photographic images. The remainder of the paper will be devoted to developing a critique of the principal historical priority sustaining a culture of photographic images-a historico-epistemologicalfixation on the photograph as the most valued product

David Tomas

Papers

Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg:

Transcultural space and transcultural beings

Toward an anthropology of sight: Ritual performance and the photographic process

The ritual of photography

From the Photograph to Postphotographic Practice: Toward a Postoptical Ecology of the Eye