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Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, edited by Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch. Wesleyan University Press, 2005

with the Internet. Chun accordingly explores cyberpunk fiction to investigate how they make electronic spaces understandable and pleasurable. Analyzing William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, Chun contends that cyberpunk is bound to the present through its use of “high-tech Orientalism,” which “seeks to orient the reader to a technology-overloaded present/future (which is portrayed as belonging to Japan or other Far East countries) through the promise of readable difference, and through a conflation of information networks with an exotic urban landscape . . . High-tech Orientalism offers the pleasure of exploring, the pleasure of “learning,” and the pleasure of being somewhat overwhelmed, but ultimately jacked in” (177). The biggest contribution this chapter makes has less to do with understanding how Orientalism is inherent in narratives of cyberspace and more to do with the important connections Chun makes between high-tech Orientalism and the pleasures they offer. This reading allows her to expand on the how the Internet “also revises our understanding of Orientalism by disengaging Orientalism from the Orient” (242). Chun says technology has enabled Orientalism to travel. For example, Russian women are also to be found on sites promoting Oriental mail-order brides, implying an expanding consumer base. Thus high-tech Orientalism not only displaces traditional categories, but also is intimately linked with global commerce. The fifth and final chapter expands on control-freedom in relation to paranoia. Chun revisits some of the ideas presented in other chapters; what is refreshing is the way she returns to those ideas to solidify their link them with paranoia, especially post 9–11. Mainstream magazines such as Newsweek perpetuate the idea that terrorists and their supporters use the same communication technologies that “good” people do as though “suddenly discovering the downside of the Internet and the unpredictability of freedom” (256). Discourse about technology becomes paranoid; it is reduced to how technology is used in positive ways by the “good” and negatively by the “bad”. In this final chapter, Chun continues to explore other paranoid narratives that seek to limit (or strongly question) how much “freedom” should be allowed and whether that freedom can be reduced to control. Chun’s conclusion? “We must explore the democratic potential of communication technologies—a potential that stems from our vulnerabilities rather than our control. And we must face and seize freedom with determination rather than fears and alibis” (297).