Cyber Zen

Cyber Zen

EnglishHardbackPrint on demand
Grieve Gregory Price
Taylor & Francis Ltd
EAN: 9780415628716
Print on demand
Delivery on Tuesday, 4. of March 2025
€145.22
Common price €161.36
Discount 10%
pc
Do you want this product today?
Oxford Bookshop Banská Bystrica
not available
Oxford Bookshop Bratislava
not available
Oxford Bookshop Košice
not available

Available formats

Detailed information

Cyber Zen ethnographically explores Buddhist practices in the online virtual world of Second Life. Does typing at a keyboard and moving avatars around the screen, however, count as real Buddhism? If authentic practices must mimic the actual world, then Second Life Buddhism does not. In fact, a critical investigation reveals that online Buddhist practices have at best only a family resemblance to canonical Asian traditions and owe much of their methods to the late twentieth-century field of cybernetics. If, however, they are judged existentially, by how they enable users to respond to the suffering generated by living in a highly mediated consumer society, then Second Life Buddhism consists of authentic spiritual practices.

Cyber Zen explores how Second Life Buddhist enthusiasts form communities, identities, locations, and practices that are both products of and authentic responses to contemporary Network Consumer Society. Gregory Price Grieve illustrates that to some extent all religion has always been virtual and gives a glimpse of possible future alternative forms of religion.

EAN 9780415628716
ISBN 0415628717
Binding Hardback
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publication date December 11, 2016
Pages 266
Language English
Dimensions 234 x 156
Country United Kingdom
Readership General
Authors Grieve Gregory Price
Illustrations 12 Halftones, black and white
Series Media, Religion and Culture