Cyberpop is an analysis of cyberculture and its popular cultural productions. The study begins with a Foucaultian model of cyberculture as a discursive formation, and explains how some key concepts (such as 'virtuality, ' 'speed, ' and 'Connectivity') operate as a conceptual architecture network linking technologies to information and individual subjects. The chapters then each focus on a particular cyberfiguration, including Hollywood films (GATTACA, The Matrix), popular literature (William Gibson's Neuromancer, Scott Westerfeld's Polymorph), advertising for digital products and services (Apple Computer's '1984/McIntosh' campaign, AT&T's 'mLife' campaign), digital artworks (including virtual females such as Motorola's 'Mya' and Elite Modeling Agency's 'Webbie Tookay, ' and work by visual artist Daniel Lee for Microsoft's 'Evolution' campaign), and video games (Tomb Raider). Each close reading illustrates the ways in which representations of digital lifestyles and identities - which typically fetishize computers and celebrate a 'high tech' aesthetic encourage participation in digital capitalism and commodity cyberculture.Matrix argues that popular representations of cyberculture often function as forms of social criticism that creatively inspire audiences to 'think different' (in the words of Mac advertising) about the consequences of the digitalization of everyday li

"Cyberpop: Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture" is an analysis of cyberculture and its popular cultural productions. The study begins with a Foucaultian model of cyberculture as a discursive formation, and explains how some key concepts (such as "virtuality," "speed," and "Connectivity") operate as a conceptual architecture network linking technologies to information and individual subjects. The chapters then each focus on a particular cyberfiguration, including Hollywood films ("GATTACA," "The Matrix)," popular literature (William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Scott Westerfeld's "Polymorph"), advertising for digital products and services (Apple Computer's "1984/McIntosh" campaign, AT&T's "mLife" campaign), digital artworks (including virtual females such as Motorola's "Mya" and Elite Modeling Agency's "Webbie Tookay," and work by visual artist Daniel Lee for Microsoft's "Evolution" campaign), and video games ("Tomb Raider"). Each close reading illustrates the ways in which representations of digital lifestyles and identities--which typically fetishize computers and celebrate a "high tech" aesthetic encourage participation in digital capitalism and commodity cyberculture. Matrix argues that popular representations of cyberculture often function as forms of social criticism that creatively inspire audiences to "think different" (in the words of Mac advertising) about the consequences of the digitalization of everyday life.

In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, "Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film--the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life-- mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales."
Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.