Transcending recent attempts to pigeonhole 'the information revolution', this book shows how the paradoxical aspects of new media and the Internet (is it masculine or feminine? Does it mean peace or war?) are the peculiarly intense expression of the contradictions underlying our whole society. Andrew Calcutt is an enthusiastic champion of the potential for new communications technology, and a trenchant critic of the culture of fear which prevents its realisation.

Transcending recent attempts to pigeonhole 'the information revolution', this book shows how the paradoxical aspects of new media and the Internet (is it masculine or feminine? Does it mean peace or war?) are the peculiarly intense expression of the contradictions underlying our whole society. Andrew Calcutt is an enthusiastic champion of the potential for new communications technology, and a trenchant critic of the culture of fear which prevents its realisation.

Transcending recent attempts to pigeonhole 'the information revolution', this book shows how the paradoxical aspects of new media and the Internet (is it masculine or feminine? Does it mean peace or war?) are the peculiarly intense expression of the contradictions underlying our whole society. Andrew Calcutt is an enthusiastic champion of the potential for new communications technology, and a trenchant critic of the culture of fear which prevents its realisation.

Since the 1990s, both politics and pop culture have been dominated by the twin motifs of the victim and the child. Calcutt traces the history of these motifs back to their origins in the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes that the counterculture, far from being liberating, has provided a ready-made verbal and visual language for today's victim culture and the authoritarian politics arising from it. This title discusses the erosion of adulthood as a pop cultural phenomenon that requires demystification and as a social problem which must be overcome.