SOURCE: “Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage: Some Recent Literature of Cyberspace,” in Technology and Culture, Vol. 39, No. 3, July, 1998, pp. 499-511.

In the following essay, Bowker reviews several volumes of cyberpunk theory and maintains that the writing of cyberspace has global social significance.

What is this thing called cyberspace? According to some, we are witnessing the emergence of the global mind: a revolutionary change in human practice of no less import than the invention of printing, or, before it, of language. Most of the contributors to the five books under review here adopt this position—though, like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match has been thrown, they go off dazzlingly, dizzyingly, and often dementedly in different directions from this central starting point.¹ According to another view, more sparsely represented in these works, we are doing much the same sorts of things we have always done...