| E-mail Trouble: Love and Addiction @ the Matrix Contributor(s): Baty, S. Paige (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 0292708645 ISBN-13: 9780292708648 Publisher: University of Texas Press OUR PRICE: $19.75 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 1999 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Sociology - General - Psychology | Psychopathology - General - Biography & Autobiography | Women |
| Dewey: 616.858 |
| LCCN: 98-8963 |
| Series: Constructs |
| Physical Information: 0.47" H x 6.06" W x 8.45" (0.54 lbs) 167 pages |
| Themes: - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you need anybody to talk to--anybody at all--because you believe that your connections have failed you. This kind of connection leaves you cold and dead inside, because it lacks history and a language of belonging. In this daring, postmodern autobiography, S. Paige Baty recounts her search for love and community on the Internet. Taking Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a point of departure, Baty describes both an actual road trip to meet the object of an e-mail romance and the cyber-search for connection that draws so many people into the matrix of the Internet. Writing in a bold, experimental style that freely mixes e-mails, poems, fragments of quotations, and puns into expository text, she convincingly links e-mail trouble with female trouble in the displacement of embodied love and accountable human relationships to opaque screens and alienated identities. Her book stands as a vivid feminist critique of our culture's love affair with technology and its dehumanizing effect on personal relationships. |
Contributor Bio(s): Baty, S. Paige: - The late S. Paige Baty was also the author of American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic. |