Cyberliteracy
Navigating the Internet with Awareness
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The Internet has changed our social spaces, our political and social realities, our use of language, and the way we communicate, all with breathtaking speed. Almost everyone who deals with the Internet and the new world of cyberspace communication at times feels bewildered, dismayed, or even infuriated. In this clear and helpful book, computer communications scholar Laura J. Gurak takes a close look at the critical issues of online communication and discusses how to become literate in the new mass medium of our era.
In cyberspace, Gurak shows us, literacy means much more than knowing how to read. Cyberliteracy means being able to sort fact from fiction, to detect extremism from reasonable debate, and to identify gender bias, commercialism, imitation, parody, and other aspects of written language that are problematic in online communication. Active reading skills are essential in cyberspace, where hoaxes abound, advertising masquerades as product information, privacy is often compromised, and web pages and e-mail messages distort the truth. Gurak analyzes the new language of the Internet, explaining how to prepare for its discourse and protect oneself from its hazards. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the impact of the Internet on the practices of reading and writing and on our culture in general.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Avid e-mailers and zealous Web surfers recognize that the Internet possesses its own linguistic system: grammar and mechanics are less important, abbreviations and "emoticons" are more so. But the differences in communication don't stop there. Gurak (Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace), an associate professor and director of the Internet Studies Center at the University of Minnesota, goes beyond examining the electronic world's free-and-easy wordsmithing to tackle the fundamental characteristics of how people online really communicate with one another. Becoming cyberliterate, she writes, means that one must "recognize that technologies have consequences, and that we can decide how we allow the Internet to be part of our lives." Cyberliteracy is a new skill: not only do online communications have aspects of both oral and written speech, they vary in their legitimacy netizens must analyze them to separate logical argument from illogical rant and e-mail hoax from e-mail truth. When defining cyberliteracy and detailing its effects, the book is convincing; when Gurak describes what an e-mail flame is, or how easy it is to shop online, however, she treads on familiar ground. Her thoughts on anonymity and gender are shared by many of her colleagues and other writers, and the enduring online privacy debates are given a cursory glance that fails to advance either side of the argument. When she sticks close to her academic rhetorician's roots, Gurak's writing is lively and edifying, but when she strays into broader and oft-considered topics, the work falters.
