INTRODUCTION

During the latter half of the 1990s, many commentators in media outlets, policy circles and governments around the world suggested we were entering a ‘new economy’. The new economy was, and is, said to be based on new technological advancements like the Internet and digital modes of technology. When the new economy was taking off many commentators, policy advisers and politicians greeted these economic developments in an extremely positive manner. We know, too, that many academics also sought to show that we live in ‘new times’ of informational labour and networked subjectivities in which capitalism gains profits through every nook and cranny of society. Of course, we could go even further back in history. In the early 1970s, the futurologist and sociologist, Daniel Bell, argued that dominant capitalist societies were in the midst of a transformation from industrial societies to post-industrial societies. Comprising a service sector with professional white-collar workers, post-industrial societies employed information and knowledge to establish new cooperative relations among and between people. For example, information networks provided greater mechanisms for participation in public affairs by making it easier for people to gather information about public issues (Bell 1999: 128–9).

Unsurprisingly, many have been sceptical of such declarations. Mosco (2004), for instance, does much to debunk some of the hyperbole surrounding contemporary forms of communication and its impact on society. He reminds us of the exhilaration felt by many commentators of the day with the arrival of everyday technologies like electricity, the telegraph, radio, TV. Some observers in the 1920's United States genuinely believed that direct democracy would spring from radio's accessibility and mass appeal. In the words of one commentator, radio had dispensed with the ‘political middlemen’ by forcing politicians to speak their mind ‘fully, candidly, and in extenso’ (cited in Mosco 2004: 129). Just as some analysts today herald technological advances as having the potential to change politics as we know it, so some commentators in the 1920s saw radio as bringing about a social revolution unshackled by the prevailing social order.

Mosco's point, of course, is that a type of ‘technological hype’ has been prevalent throughout modern history.