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Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace
 
 
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Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace [Hardcover]

Margaret Wertheim (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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In Pythagoras' Trousers, science writer and feminist Margaret Wertheim took an astute look at the social and cultural history of physics. She explored how the development of physics became intertwined with the rising power of institutionalized religion, and how both of these predominantly masculine pursuits have influenced women's ability to join the physics community. Now she has turned her attention to virtual reality, looking at similarities between how we view it today and how art and religion was viewed in medieval times. Her assertion is that rather than carrying us forward into new and fabulous other worlds, virtual reality is actually carrying us backwards--to essentially medieval dreams. Beginning with the medieval view, with its definition of the world as spiritual space, Wertheim traces the emergence of modern physics' emphasis on physical space. She then presents her thesis: that cyberspace, which is an outgrowth of modern science, posits the existence of a genuine yet immaterial world in which people are invited to commune in a nonbodily fashion, just as medieval theology brought intangible souls together in heaven. The perfect realm awaits, we are told, not behind the pearly gates but the electronic gateways labeled .com and .net. How did we get from seeing ourselves in soul space (the world of Dante and the late medievals) to seeing ourselves as purely in body space (the world of Newton and Einstein)? This crucial transition and the new shift propelled by the Internet are convincingly described in this challenging book.

From Publishers Weekly

In this serious and intriguing, if far-fetched, study, Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers) argues that cyberspace gives us "a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven." She explains that early Christians hoped to trade "the troubled material world" for the next one, where bodies would be perfected or disappear and "injustice and squalor" would vanish. Internet partisans make similar claims: in cyberspace everyone's equal and nobody's ugly. Christian theology, as espoused by medieval art and literature, imagined a place for bodies (this world) and a place for minds and souls (the next world). But modern science and modern thought (the Renaissance invention of perspective; Copernicus, Newton, Einstein) have explained and demystified physical space, leaving "no place more special than any other," nowhere for us to imagine that souls can be. Wertheim discusses hopeful fictions of "hyperspace," from H.G. Wells to Cubism to Star Wars, before turning (in chapter 6) to the Net, whose denizens?especially users of MUDS (multiple-user dungeons)?have, she contends, found a space for the soul online. This is, she adds, cause for both celebration and worry, since the "cyber-utopians" haven't found a clear way to make cyberspace stand (as Heaven did) for an ethics. Wertheim is intent on explaining the Net's meanings, not its workings. If her book belongs to one particular field, it's the minuscule?but mushrooming?one in which literary and cultural critics consider Net phenomena. As such, it's both provocative and worthwhile.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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First Sentence
Halfway along the journey of his life, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri set out on what has become the most famous journey of the Middle Ages: a trip to the end of the universe and back. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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3.5 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Pearly Gates of Cyberspace full of fuzzy thinking, Sep 21 2000
By 
H.M. Gladney (Saratoga, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace (Paperback)
Even if the world needed a book on this theme, this is not the one!

One thread of this book is the notion of collision between scientific thinking and theology--a collision which in my view is not forced by anything observable or reasonably thinkable.

In early chapters, the author makes dogmatic statements about what was on the minds of numerous famous authors--statements for which no justification is given, and for thoughts which arguably have milder and more flattering interpretations: e.g., that Dante and other mediaevals took a certain spatial view of heaven and hell literally. In this case, the milder interpretation might recognize that writing anything likely to offend certain Churchmen risked persecution--so that what authors expressed might often left out subtle and careful thinking.

The chapters on what's going on since the mid-1980's read like a journalist's hasty pastiche of things written and thought by others, with little acknowledgement and even less discernable new thought.

However, my main objection is that this author has set up a flimsy strawman to knock down with many words, viz., that the coincidence of the syllable "space" in "cyberspace" implies a serious analogy to metric spaces. This analogy might play a roll in hoi poloi minds, but that Wertheim's middle chapters talk of the work of several well-known scientists seems to imply that serious scientists take such an analogy seriously. In many years of listening to scientific colleagues, I heard nothing to suggest such a view.

In contrast, Wertheim ignores all social thinking that is a reasonable precursor to today's views and actions around cyberspace. Recall the notion that "a university is a community centered on a library", and many, many related works about how communities work and about domains of ideas.

Furthermore, in discussing science Wertheim ignores the most important factor that drove philosophical and scientific thinkers to their views of metric spaces--symmetry and simple forms in differential equations.

On the positive side, I learned a few obscure and very interesting names--those of thinkers before their time. E.g., Nicolas of Cusa (13th century), Kaluza (19th century). I'll dig into those.

Summary: for any careful thinker, this book is a distraction and waste of time.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Great title, but ..., Oct 13 2000
By 
Rob Brennan (Mortlake, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace (Hardcover)
I certainly enjoyed reading this book, and found some of the material in the earlier chapters very interesting, for example, about the development of the theory of perspective in art.

However,I felt that the bridge into the cyberspace stuff was rather strained and unconvincing. Certainly, the whole internet thing is of great significance to human development, but it didn't seem to fit comfortably into the space that Wertheim wants to put it.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Very good, Nov 9 1999
This review is from: Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace (Hardcover)
This book offers a very introduction and explanation to the concept of space and links both historic and present situations in a perfect way. If you're interested in either philosophy, the internet, history, religion or all of that together, then read the book !
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