Every year, we put together two issues without any preordained theme, soliciting articles on random topics and inviting our authors to explore ideas that don't fit neatly into one of our special topic issues. Just as we must fight against material inequalities, we must also fight against the kinds of media representations that persuade whole populations to accept injustice as natural and right.
All freedoms require some limitations.
The point, in each of these essays, is to question who sets those limits on media spaces and why. In their essays on the mass-mediated online community, John Ives and Ed Korthof consider computer users' relationships to Internet technology. Computer virus hoaxes , Ives suggests, are a new kind of urban folklore that reveal social anxieties about who can gain access to our private lives through online networks. Tim Jackson's philosophical consideration of the ontology of new media follows these essays with several clear directions for where media might take us as a global society if used progressively and democratically. Both are marked by workers' physical injury and fatigue.