This is an interdisciplinary book. Its arguments are informed by conversations in several areas of study and should appeal to anyone researching in these areas. They include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Political theory: The book explores the implications of a new technology for what is essentially a longstanding debate about the essential characteristics of democracy. As such, it ought to interest political theorists and Americanists as a suitable complementary text for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in democratic theory, contemporary political theory, citizenship studies, and telecommunications policy analysis.
- International Relations: This study also offers a suggestive framework for analyzing the cross-border and even global space flows that networking technology makes possible and their implications for redefining the state and civil society, for enhancing transnational social movements, and perhaps also for enabling what David Held has referred to as “a cosmopolitan model of democracy.”
- Geography: Radical geographers may greet this book with some enthusiasm for its attempt to provide a more serious treatment than many other theorists have offered of the spatial assumptions that underlie classic works in democratic theory. In addition, the systematic application of Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of social space to the study of cyberspace should provide some fruitful ground for discussion and further analysis.
- Critical social theory: In its focus on the body, the book also contributes to a growing literature in feminist scholarship and social theory (e.g., by Judith Butler, Elizabeth Gross, Pierre Bourdieu, and others). Foucauldian scholars, in particular, will be engaged by this study’s contribution to a broadening of discourse analytic techniques through an elaboration of Foucault’s underdeveloped concept of heterotopia.
- Communications studies: One of the underlying themes in this analysis is that democracy is fundamentally about citizens being able to communicate with each other. This study suggests that new electronic media lie somewhere between "unmediated" personal communication at one end and "mass mediated" broadcast communication at the other end. It does not offer a completely sanguine view of computer-mediated communication (CMC), but neither does it condemn all electronic mediation as interested and controlled. What it does do is provide suggestive ways to evaluate what should count as democratic communication.
- Internet research: Significant portions of this study may be taken up by academic and non-academic researchers interested in exploring the social and political implications of computer networking, electronic mediation, and telecommunications policy. The book is not just theoretical in its strategy but technical, historical, and anthropological, as well, discussing the physical infrastructure of the Internet, its origins in U.S. defense research on developing a robust networking architecture, and its further development in relation to an emergent cyber-culture peopled by hackers, cryptologists, computer cross-dressers, and virtual communities.
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