Remote Control

Abstract

The growth of the internet has been, by any standards, extraordinary: from a local secret among scientists at the beginning of the 1990s to the topic of everyday conversation at the end of the decade, from an anarchic information network for the bizarre and the banal to an entire economy of self-made millionaires and inflated share prices. The internet, it is estimated, doubles in size every year. The accompanying rhetoric has been similarly dramatic, with talk of every aspect of human life being transformed by this new form of communication. Politics has not escaped; it too is to be transformed.