Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro (Eds.): Prefiguring Cyberculture. An Intellectual History. Power Publications, Sydney 2002.
	It is a passion. I cannot resist reading about Cyberculture. If I can read it without glasses, that is. Unfortunately the typography of this book requires very strong eyesight, and as beautiful as the layout is presented, the tiny point size and wide lines do not help its legibility. The 322 pages should have been 500+, or even better, an e-book, where zooming the text size and searching for keywords is optional. Nevertheless, as Senior Editor Darren Tofts (Chair of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne) puts it, "Prefiguring Cyberculture" addresses the matrix of themes to do with the integration of human life and technology, based on an idea from 1998, and expressed in essays and artists' statements. The titles of the sections speak for themselves: "I, Robot: AI, Alife and Cyborgs" (not my favourite), "Virtuality: Webworlds and Cyberspaces" (here we are) and "Futuropolis: Postmillennial Speculations" (oh, utopia). In spite of the eyestrain, I am drawn to revisit this book over and over again. By chewing little pieces of well-written essays, one at a time, I can ponder questions like: "How has the technological future been imagined? […] How has it measured up to those imaginings?" and digest thoughts like: "What does it mean to be human?" or "In an age dominated by the concept of the virtual, what is reality?" Of course this "intellectual history" is still in the making and cannot provide all the answers, but the strong thoughts of 32 media critics and theorists, philosophers, and historians of science walk us through cybercultural practice and theory, giving a great many clues and surprises. Every essay makes the reader excited to learn more about the virtual and real worlds we live in, thus having created a book one will pull off the shelf many more times.
Reviewed by Gerald Ganglbauer, 26 May 2003