Hello World: Travels In Virtuality

Abstract

Hello World: travels in virtuality draws together perspectives from environmental writing (Thoreau, Grey Owl), phenomenology (Bachelard, Romanyshyn, Leder), and new media (Turkle, Haraway, Kroker and others) to interrogate the development of cyberculture. It contends that cyberspace is a consciousness that we make together, the outcome of a complex sequencing of collective imagination such as the embodied objectivity described by Haraway and comprising ‘the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promotes a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment.’ (Haraway 1991: 196). Hello World is in many ways a sequel to Thomas’s earlier fictional attempts to take hold of the implications of digital experience, although the later book was informed by eight years of navigating hypermedia spaces and so the text, the printed volume, and the accompanying website were all designed to reflect that awareness. As such, it is one of the first UK print books of its kind to launch with a companion website at http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com. Hello World has been used as a set text on several graduate courses, most notably ‘Landscape and the Social Imaginary: Romantic Landscape and Cyberspace’ at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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