Introduction to ‘A Journey of Integration’
PhD Thesis 2005. ‘A Journey of Integration — Virtuality And Physicality In A Computer-Mediated Environment’
Introduction to A Journey of Integration
I first became enchanted by computers in 1985. I had gone to university as a mature student to major in English and History, but it was the optional short course ‘Computers for Management’ that changed my life. It was there that I learned to code in Basic, played adventure games from cassette tapes connected to my Amstrad 6128, and began to grasp the enormity of what programming could do. Everything I have written, studied and thought about since then goes back to those heady days in a tiny computer lab run by the Geography Department at a time when nobody else in the Humanities Faculty had a clue about what was to come.
In 2005, almost twenty years and several books later, I submitted my PhD thesis, ‘A Journey of Integration’, tracking two decades of discoveries, imaginings and mistakes.
This is the first time, so many years after completion, that my thesis has been made available. Why not before? Two reasons, really. First, since it is a Thesis by Publication (explained below), it’s not as traditionally academic as most conventional theses, and this…
