Misunderstanding the Internet

The growth of the internet has been spectacular. There are now more 1.5 billion internet users across the globe, about one quarter of the world’s population. This is certainly a new phenomenon that is of enormous significance for the economic, political and social life of contemporary societies.

However, much popular and academic writing about the internet takes a technologically deterministic view, assuming that the internet’s potential will be realised in essentially transformative ways. This was especially true in the euphoric moment of the mid-1990s, when many commentators wrote about the internet with awe and wonderment. While this moment may be over, its underlying technocentrism – the belief that technology determines outcomes – lingers on, and with it, a failure to understand the internet in its social, economic and political context.

Misunderstanding the Internet is a short introduction, encompassing the history, sociology, politics and economics of the internet and its impact on society. The book has a simple three part structure:

• Part 1 looks at the history of the internet, and offers an overview of the internet’s place in society
• Part 2 focuses on the control and economics of the internet
• Part 3 examines the internet’s political and cultural influence

Misunderstanding the Internet is a polemical, sociologically and historically informed textbook that aims to challenge both popular myths and existing academic orthodoxies around the internet.

James Curran is Professor of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre. He has written or edited 21 books about the media, including Power Without Responsibility (with Jean Seaton), now in its seventh edition, Media and Society now in its fifth edition, and Media and Power, translated into five languages. He has been a visiting professor at California, Penn, Stanford, Oslo and Stockholm Universities.

James Curran is the 2011 winner of the ICA's C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy.

Natalie Fenton is Professor of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London where she is also Co-Director of the Goldsmiths Media Research Centre: Spaces, Connections, Control, and Co-Director of Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. She has published widely on issues relating to media, politics and new media and is particularly interested in rethinking understandings of public culture, the public sphere and democracy.

Des Freedman is a Reader in Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Media Policy (2008), co-editor of Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (2011) and one of the UK representatives on the management committee of the COST A20 project that examined the impact of the internet on the mass media. He is a co-editor of the journal Global Media and Communication and a researcher in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.