New technologies spread by word of mouth. Legends, myths and narratives accompany a new technology while it is still in development and announce it to a broader audience in society, to its potential users. Many stories have been told of imagining futures drafting possible trends in the use and development of technology (Barbrook 2005). The attempt to bring technology to perfection and to create a utopia through engineering has been recognized as an important agent of change (e.g. Peters 1999; Daniels 2002; De Vries 2008). Whether a positive or negative utopia is depicted depends on which terminology, images, and associations are chosen to imagine and present the new media. In view of participation, a negative utopia manifests itself as the dark side of the tempting promise for social progress, as the potential abuse of technology for repression. However, popular discourse rarely touches upon this. Rather, it promotes a positive utopia. The new media, the Internet, the personal computer, but also the mobile phone and wireless communication entered popular discourse in tandem with a rhetoric of promise which envisioned a brighter future. Jan van Dijk points out four examples where technological design is related in popular discourse to utopian notions of participation and social progress: The notion of teledemocracy in the 1980s, virtual communities and the new economy in the 1990s, and most recently the Web 2.0 (2006). Here, metaphors, associations and images create a certain imago of technology. They are part of a rhetoric of progress that can be recognized in the representations of new media in popular discourse. Referring to past media revolutions or a culturally constituted imagination of technological progress, they are often familiar and thus comprehensible for audiences and easily employable for promoters. Science fiction texts from Jules Verne to William Gibson, alternative concepts of society from Thomas Morus to 1960s counter-culture, and images from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix contribute to this and are representative of the current debates. McLuhan described our limitation for perceiving the future only in terms of past developments, as if we looked ‘at the present through a rear-view mirror’ (1967:74).