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Italian version

Vincent Mosco, Digital Sublime, Myth, Power, and Cyberspace, The MIT Press . book
Vincent Mosco
Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace
<book> The MIT Press
ISBN 026213439X
Every radical media transformation induced by a new technology brings along the myth of the beginning of a new era. In the haste to liquidate the grey past and with a proportional enthusiasm for the potential transformation, the usual processes repeat once again. These processes include the hopes for social change and almost religious visions of miracles which the new modes to move information should bring. The narration of the myth enters here, together with the fact that, its logical and practical groundlessness notwithstanding, it always succeeds in convincing the consciences of its truth until it becomes indisputable. The cases documented in this book (such as the electricity, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone and the television) highlight the common traits of those revolutionary new visions of the perception of time, space, history and politics. In the case of computer networks, the immateriality of information facilitates this 'rise to the heavens', represented by great expectations and utopiae. The analysis of the mystic phenomenon of 'dot coms', as well as the physical destruction of the symbol of the transition from industrial to post-industrial economy (the World Trade Center), is useful to understand the mechanisms of birth, propagation and belief of myths in the unbounded and fluid cyberspace territory.