This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

Misinformation has only recently seen a surge in research interest and public attention, but the concept itself is much older. Not only have humans manipulated and lied to each other since the dawn of language, but animals are also known to use manipulation to achieve certain goals. This chapter provides a historical overview of misinformation. It first looks at some of its possible evolutionary origins, before tracing how false information has been used as a tool of persuasion throughout history, and discussing the role of technological innovations such as the printing press and mass communications. Finally, we look at the recent advent of the internet era, and what role misinformation plays in society today.

The promotion of suicide and description of suicide methods on the Internet have led to widespread concern that legal control is mandated. Apart from value concerns pertaining to attitudes about suicide, the guarantee of freedom of expression presents a serious challenge to the introduction of restrictive laws. Recent developments in Australia and Europe are presented, noting jurisdictional complexity as an obstacle to effective application. Scientific data of an epidemiological nature are revealed to be insufficient to warrant making causal assertions about the Internet and its relation to suicidal acts, including those of vulnerable populations. Regardless of restrictions, the uncontrolled Darknet hosts suicide encouragement and information on methods to kill oneself. Recommendations are made with respect to public education, suicide prevention and future research.

This chapter starts by reviewing the history of American news media since 1789, focusing on how new production technologies and business models led to a comparatively unbiased, objective journalism in the mid-20th Century. The difference today that audiences have become far more polarized. This has enabled market segmentation strategies in which each broadcaster avoid competition by pandering to a different political viewpoint. More recently, the rise of the Web has accelerated the rate at which new political messages can be invented, tested on audiences, and eventually refined to the point where mainstream outlets are prepared to broadcast it. The question remains how effectively large news organizations and Web platforms can suppress information they disagree with. The chapter explores when and to what extent todays markets permit this.

The versatility of irony is evident in the variety of ways and places in which it is used. This chapter considers some of the complexities of ironic language on the internet (e.g., social media, messaging apps). Yus views irony as being associated with making a reference to some state of affairs that can be criticized or mocked, and which communicates a speaker’s attitudes toward that situation, including others who adopt a similar point of view. He embraces a “relevance theory” perspective to emphasize the prominence of echoic mention as a key source of pragmatic information when determining an ironic speaker’s dissociative attitude. Yus details the range of contextual information that enables successful irony use, even in situations where individuals do not share the same immediate physical space. This information includes widely held encyclopedic background knowledge, speaker-specific encyclopedic knowledge, previous utterances, particular linguistic cues, and information from the current physical setting. These different sources of contextual information are combined in specific ways to enable ironic meaning interpretation when people are not physical co-present (e.g., when posting messages or writing email on the internet).

This chapter offers a synthesis on the role the law has to play in Automated States. Arguing for a new research and regulatory agenda on AI and ADM beyond the artificial ‘public’ and ‘private’ divide, it seeks to identify new approach and safeguards necessary to make AI companies and the Automated States accountable to their customers, citizens and communities. I argue that emphasis on procedural safeguards alone – or what I call procedural fetishism – is not enough to counter the unprecedented levels of AI power in the Automated States. Only by shifting our perspective from procedural to substantive, we can search for new ways to regulate the future in the Automated States. The chapter concludes the collection with an elaboration of what more substantive regulation should look like: create a global instrument on data privacy, redistribute wealth and power by breaking and taxing AI companies, increasing public scrutiny and adopting prohibitive laws; democratizing AI companies by making them public utilities, and giving people a say how these companies should be governed. Crucially, we must also decolonize future AI regulation by recognizing colonial practices of extraction and exploitation and paying attention to the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities of the so-called Global South. With all these mutually reinforcing efforts, the new AI regulation will debunk the corporate and state agenda of procedural fetishism and establish a new social contract in the age of AI.

The final myth, new technology threatens writing, brings us full circle back to myth 1, because it keeps limiting correct writing. It puts correct writing at odds with informal digital writing, even when correct writing is critiqued for being stodgy. We get the idea that correct writing is controlled, whereas informal digital writing is careless, and we limit who reads correct writing and what writing is studied in school. Closer to the truth is that if you are alarmed by something – say, text message slang – you will notice it more, even if most written English is neither changing nor fundamentally different. Informal writing is not the same thing as careless writing, and it is both similar and different from formal writing on the writing continuum.

Chapter 8 studies what we can do so that people do not fall into traps of trying to believe in conspiracy theories that resist falsification. Belief in conspiracy theories often starts by looking at important societal authorities and a certain amount of suspicion about these authorities. The chapter examines when conspiracy thinking feels so good that people exaggerate their levels of suspicion of what is actually going on in society. The chapter also explains how the online quality of our modern way of living tends to amplify levels of suspicion and the ease with which conspiracy theories are spread. The chapter distinguishes between three different motivations that often are equated with each other, yet that drive conspiracy thinking in different ways. One important motivation is epistemic and concerns people trying to make sense of what is going on in their world. Another important motivation is existential and concerns people trying to deal with threats in their life. Yet another motivation concerns group identification. This includes people wanting to belong to unique groups that give them a sense of belonging. The three motivations point out different ways of trying to intervene when people start falling for exaggerated suspicion and conspiracy thoughts.

This chapter offers an empirically informed approach that utilizes the Internet and social media to provide support and resources for health concerns. The topic of self-injury will be used as a case illustration throughout. To this end, initiatives aimed at supporting and offering outreach for people with lived experience of self-injury as well as key stakeholders who can play key support roles will be presented. By the end of the chapter, readers will be able to reflect on how these various considerations can be drawn upon when planning their own outreach efforts aimed at providing support and informational resources for a range of health concerns via the Internet.

This chapter examines research about recruitment to political and new religious movements from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, contrasting those results with the meager research base on participants in QAnon, noting similarities and differences. The major finding from the earlier research was that young people participated of their own volition as an expression of their human agency. They were not “brainwashed”. This key finding is generally applicable to QAnon participants, although QAnon devotees are typically older and often were recruited through social media and the internet. Social psychological theories such as “foot-in-the-door” and what happens when prophecies fail are applied to QAnon recruitment as well. The chapter ends with suggestions for research needed to fully understand QAnon recruitment.

Whether or not the USA has its own fascist tradition is not merely a political but also a cultural question. This chapter examines America’s fascist potential by exploring how it has been depicted in popular alternate history television shows, including The Man in the High Castle (2015–2019), The Plot Against America (2020), Hunters (2019–2023), and Watchmen (2019). Echoing older fears of domestic fascism in American history, the four shows reflect growing concerns about America’s political future in the Trump era, and arrive at a common set of conclusions: they insist that fascism poses a serious threat to the United States; they pessimistically depict Americans passively accepting, or actively collaborating with, fascist rule; they urgently advise the targets of fascism – Jews, African Americans, and other minorities – to combine forces in combating it; and they explore the vexing question of whether using violence against fascism is ethically permitted or is itself “fascist.” These alternate histories show how universalizing the fascist past can foster a sense of political solidarity among groups threatened by fascism in the present.