This is a work that demands to be engaged, questioned and pondered. As the web of telecommunications technology spreads across the globe, the site of economic development, social change and political struggle shifts to the realm of media and communications. In this provocative, innovative and remarkable book, Taylor and Saarinen challenge the reader to rethink politics, education, religion, architecture, economics and even thinking itself. To read Imagologies is to step into the twenty-first century and it is a fascinating, dizzying journey.

IMAGOLOGIES is an antibook concerned with what it considers to be a necessary shift in the academic approach to media philosophy. According to the authors this shift is cultural, intellectual and philosophical. It calls for a restructuring of media function and capability within cyberspace, within the realm of the simulacrum and within the mediatrix.

IMAGOLOGIES looks at virtually every facet of the radical changes taking place within communications, from cyborgs and electronomics to hypertext and cyberwar. Its intellectual approach is both unorthodox and unsettling, yet within its pages are valuable perceptions which sometimes illustrate the current and future direction of electronic media.

Much of this production is innovative, timely and trendy. Still, there are journal correspondences here between the authors that I found much too tedious. And, at its worst, IMAGOLOGIES turns outdated techological terms into tired e-mail banters, capsulizes philosophical content into rampant sound bites, and visually distracts with graphical text and eye-catching geometries.

Everything about this work is designed to catch the eye. But it tries too hard to dazzle. Philosophical scholars and intellectuals may feel the need to look deeper, and may eventually interpret these markers as red flags when determining the overall validity of this antibook's rhetoric, and its final destiny within the narrow halls of academia.