This book relates the story of news journalism?s encounter with the World Wide Web. It conspicuously avoids words such as ?cyberspace? and ?virtuality? and the arguments, which already look anachronistic, around their implicit techno-utopias and dystopias. The short history of the web has certainly seen enough utopian claims that corporate and political hierarchies could be tumbled by a technology they could no longer control and their power dispersed into every conceivable kind of community, and I have tried to reflect some of these. In contrast, the web is also the site of moves by media conglomerates vigorously gearing-up for global pre-eminence and a new kind of hegemony. The two trends do not entirely contradict each other. With regard to its determining effects on culture and society, the web itself remains neutral even while it becomes the conduit for new power configurations and relations predicated upon a new corporate ideology.
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