Real life in the virtual world: The political economy of cyberspace

This research develops and analyzes the political economy of cyberspace with an emphasis on property, culture, community, and conceptions of the human body that are inherent to cyberspace as a 'real' space, while describing the nature of the relationship between real culture and cyber culture through the establishment of a dialogue around ideas of 'cyberproperty' and cyberculture. While conceptions of these ontocultural artifacts might represent extreme ends of the continuum of standard 'realspace' definitions, they generally feature the same elements discernable within their realspace counterparts. Consequently, it can be said that cyberspace does not exist on the fringe of human consciousness, but within the core of mainstream society and the dominant capitalistic ideology. Cyberspace is thus removed from popular mythology that locates it idealistically away from existant power structures as this research demonstrates that there is little difference between the ideologies, cultures, and subcultures of the 'cyber' and 'real' worlds.