Digital Disconnect

Celebrants and sceptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. McChesney argues that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. He says the Internet is not 'naturally' commercial. Capitalism's colonisation of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism and has made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism, an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance and an anti-democratic force.