The further reading and websites at the end of each chapter are a second kind of hypertexting, linking the reader to other places where the themes of the chapter can be explored. The sites were all up and running in January 2001, but given the ephemerality of the web, I can only apologize if any of them have vanished by the time you try to visit them. These sites aren’t the result of any kind of exhaustive or systematic survey of available sites, either. Despite Ananda Mitra and Elisia Cohen’s (1999) suggestions for ways to evaluate sites, the choice here is more personal than anything: these are sites that I think are useful ways into particular topics. Each reader can move from them in their own route, following the links that they find enticing.

At the end of the book, I have added two more resources: a glossary and another guide to further reading. These are my attempt to answer the FAQs that get asked about cybercultures. The glossary is a weird thing - compiling it calls for lots of pondering, decisions about what to include and what can be left out. Terms from cyberspace enter our everyday speech reasonably easily (Shortis 2001), and yet usage in common parlance doesn’t always equate with an ability to define any term. All I have done with the glossary is to sift through a few other glossaries provided by authors with a similar assumed audience to mine, and sifted my own text for the appearance of terms that I think could do with defining. The act of definition is itself very tricky, and another partial and contingent thing: while glossaries, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, pretend to be objective texts, we can clearly see that they are the result of somebody’s thinking. This glossary is no more than the result of mine. If I imagine my audience, I call up my own students: students doing cultural studies, who have varying amounts of prior knowledge about computers and cyberspace. In some cases, their knowledge outstrips mine, so I apologize for talking down to some readers.

The guide to further reading at the book’s end is my attempt to suggest what I think are the best handful of books for that same imagined audience. These are the books I recommend to my students, as places to begin getting to grips with cyberspace and cyberculture. I’ve added in a little commentary on the titles I’ve selected, just to help you decide which of my ‘top 20’ might be interesting or useful to you. Like the websites at each chapter’s end, this list is specific to the time and place of its compilation. Even if books don’t disappear quite as dramatically as websites sometimes do, they do have their shelf-life - and, of course, new titles appear with quite alarming frequency. Again, like the websites, this list was put together by one person (me), from one set of resources (my book shelves and teaching experience), at a particular moment (January 2001). To echo David Hakken (1999: 227) again, this book represents a ‘personal walkabout in cyberspace’ - and it’s a walkabout I think I’ll be on for a long time to come.

-5-