-What are the formal characteristics in cyberpunk that are evident in digital spaces? -Working through a collection of notes from K.N. Hayles’s wonderful texts. These, in many ways, will serve as the spine of my project (I suspect). -Uncertainty: is this what might be measured empirically in readers and digital space residents? In cyberpunk, readers…

-working through “Sciencepunk” by Bailenson et al. Some good stuff. Reference to Norman Badler’s paper, “Avatars a la Snow Crash, which was delivered at a VR conference in 1998. The paper is available here (as a .pdf). -Also mentions the book “True Names” and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which is apparently edited by…

-requested Technoscience and Cyberculture, edited by Stanley Aronowitz. I’ve been digging into the Krokers’ wonderful Critical Digital Studies and realizing that my favourite parts are those written by Arthur and Marilousie. Technoscience and Cyberculture contains a chapter by Arthur, titled “The Theory of the Virtual Class,” which sounds interesting. -discovered an article that seems to…

-requested the book Analysing Media texts, edited by Marie Gillespie and Jason Toynbee. David Hesmondhalgh (in The Cultural Industries) says that it contains a “survey of some of the main techniques for analysing media texts” (45). Perhaps such techniques will provide clues about how one might test users’ responses to virtual spaces (if an empirical…

-In their intro to New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas claim that , “By the 1990s a wealth of criticism was available that made radical claims for a narrative revolution in the light of hyptertext, gaming, MUDs, and MOOs (Douglas 1992; Aarseth 1997; Landow 1997; Murray 1997;…