book launch: 'Living on Cybermind' & 'Youth Online'

Announcing a book launch on Friday 14th March in Sydney Australia:
Jonathan Marshall and Angela Thomas
Living on Cybermind & Youth Online: 
Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age
Published by: Peter Lang
To be launched by Colin Lankshear (Series Ed)
Cybermind is an Internet mailing list,
originally founded in 1994 to
discuss the issues and problems of
living online. It proved exceptionally
fertile and is still going strong
thirteen years later. 
This book is an ethnographic investigation
which follows Cybermind
members in their daily lives on the List,
and explores the ways they look
at the world, argue, relate online life
to offline life, use gender, and
build community. Perhaps the most comprehensive
history of an Internet group ever published,
it includes detailed analyses using List
members' own words and commentary,
and develops a unique theory of the
relationship between culture,
the problems of communication,
and the ongoing processes of categorisation.
Living on Cybermind illustrates how
behaviour is affected by the organisation
of communication, and how people
deal with the paradoxes involved
in resolving ambiguity and truth in a
situation in which presence
is always on the verge of slipping away.

Jonathan Paul Marshall has an M.A. (Hons)
and Ph.D. in anthropology
from the University of Sydney.
He has been an Australian Research Council
Research Fellow at the Transforming Cultures
Research Centre at the University of Technology,
Sydney, working on a project on online gender.
He is now a QE II fellow at UTS working on
the relationship between
Information Technology and disorder.

Youth Online chronicles the stories
of young people from several
countries - the US, Australia,
Canada, Switzerland, and Holland -
and their interactions in online communities
over a seven-year period. It examines
how young people construct their identities
in various social contexts: social, fantasy,
role-playing; and for various social purposes:
leadership, learning, power, rebellion and romance.
It explores the ways youth are deploying
both visual and literary cues to develop
a full sense of presence online and
to effectively communicate with their peers.
Using methods of textual, visual,
and socio-psychological analysis, this
book illuminates the ways in which
young people are making sense of
their own identities and their place
within broader communities.

Angela Thomas is Lecturer in English Education
at the University of Sydney.
She specializes in teaching new media literacies
and is the author of numerous articles and
book chapters on fan fiction, online role-playing,
blogging, digital fiction, cyberculture,
identity, and learning in virtual worlds,
and is co-author of Children's Literature and
Computer-Based Teaching.