The Digital City and the Fragmented Self in Snow Crash: Urban Form, Networked Subjectivity, and Metaverse Satire | ||
| پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان | ||
| دوره 31، شماره 2، بهار 1405، صفحه 205-225 اصل مقاله (496.67 K) | ||
| نوع مقاله: مقاله علمی پژوهشی | ||
| شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.22059/jor.2026.409217.2800 | ||
| نویسندگان | ||
| Ali Salami* 1؛ Waleed Kareem Abbas Al. Hafadhi2 | ||
| 1Department of English Language and Literature, Alborz Campus, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. | ||
| 2Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. | ||
| چکیده | ||
| This essay contends that Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash* is best read not as a parodic dystopia of “virtual reality,” but as a theory of digital urbanism, where space is administered by protocols and the self is manufactured as an interface. The “digital city” is treated here as an urban form, not as a decorative metaphor for online life. What matters, accordingly, is governance: how movement is routed, how passage is credentialed, how presence is made legible. The novel’s franchulated sovereignties, burbclave boundaries, logistical corridors, and regulated thresholds—visas, barcodes, access gates—do not merely furnish atmosphere; they reorganize mobility into a regime of permissions. Fragmentation, then, is not a free-floating postmodern condition. It is built. Identities become modular, role-bound, and readable only through the systems that sort, index, and route them. The Metaverse’s Street functions as a second, continuous skin of the same city: it translates privatized property relations into frontage, visibility, and bandwidth, while intensifying surveillance and status into spatialized metrics. The book’s comedic exaggeration is not an evasion of seriousness but a way of making governing mechanics newly visible. Satire becomes diagnostic, rendering infrastructural power legible without allowing realist familiarity to normalize it. The novel’s analytic value lies less in predictive accuracy than in its structural continuity with platform governance. | ||
| کلیدواژهها | ||
| digital city؛ platform urbanism؛ metaverse؛ protocol governance؛ networked subjectivity؛ satire؛ fragmentation | ||
| مراجع | ||
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آمار تعداد مشاهده مقاله: 227 تعداد دریافت فایل اصل مقاله: 201 |
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