SOURCE: Foster, Thomas. “The Rhetoric of Cyberspace: Ideology or Utopia?” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (spring 1999): 144-60.

In the following review, Foster analyzes Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment and Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, in terms of rhetorical and ideative content.

As I write this review, in the fall of 1998, it is almost impossible to avoid encountering the rhetoric of “cyberspace” or electronic communications networks, if only in the form of television commercials, most notably for AT& T's and MCI's Internet services. Over the course of the last year, these multinational telecommunications companies have begun to produce advertisements celebrating computer-mediated communication in explicitly utopian terms. Typically, such advertisements stress the obsolescence of physical appearance and bodily markers of difference: cyberspace, the imaginary site of social interactions conducted through networked computers, is a “place” where gender, race, and physical disability cease to matter, we are told.

At the same...