Output details

MUDe

The major part of MUDe is a long poem which focuses on the special kinds of community fostered by the internet, and special types of language use associated with such activity, clearly of significance given the proliferation of such communities fostered by social media. The poem explores this area by taking a particular internet form — the ‘Multi-User Dimension’ (MUD) — as its organising principle (the MUD on which the poem is based can be accessed at http://www.anguish.org.) The second part of the book is a series of more traditionally organised poems exploring American car-culture. The two parts of the book are loosely linked by an interest in the way in which contemporary technology allows new, relatively fragile, types of community to form over long distances. Particularly because of the new experimental form which the long poem adopts, it is not easy to define a traditional research context for the book as a whole. The two parts of this book have been influenced, for example, by Robert D. Puttnam’s sociological study Bowling Alone: and Régis Debray’s revisionist religious history God: An Itinerary (both these books feature extended analyses of the influences of cars and computers on how we build community.) Additionally, the long poem has been influenced by readings of video/computer game history (e.g. David Kushner’s Masters of Doom and King and Borland’s Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic) and video/computer game theory (e.g. Barry Atkins More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form and Wolf and Perron’s The Video Game Theory Reader.)