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Contemporary culture offer contradictory views of the internet and new media technologies, painting them in extremes of optimistic enthusiasm and pessimistic concern. This book explores such representations, uncovering the roots of our cultural responses to the internet, centred upon a profoundly ambivalent reaction to technological modernity. Majid Yar is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hull, UK. He has researched and published widely in the areas of crime deviance studies, media popular culture, and social criminological theory.

Contemporary culture offer contradictory views of the internet and new media technologies, painting them in extremes of optimistic enthusiasm and pessimistic foreboding. While some view them as a repository of hopes for democracy, freedom and self-realisation, others consider these developments as sources of alienation, dehumanisation and danger. This book explores such representations, and situates them within the traditions of utopian and dystopian thought that have shaped the Western cultural imaginary. Ranging from ancient poetry to post-humanism, and classical sociology to science fiction, it uncovers the roots of our cultural responses to the internet, which are centred upon a profoundly ambivalent reaction to technological modernity. Majid Yar argues that it is only by better understanding our society's reactions to technological innovation that we can develop a balanced and considered response to the changes and challenges that the internet brings in its wake.

The proliferation and user uptake of social media applications has brought in its wake a growing problem of illegal and harmful interactions and content online. Recent controversy has arisen around issues ranging from the alleged online manipulation of the 2016 US presidential election by Russian hackers and 'trolls', to the misuse of users' Facebook data by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (Hall 2018; Swaine & Bennetts 2018). These recent issues notwithstanding, in the UK context, ongoing concern has focused in particular upon (a) sexually-oriented and abusive content about or directed at children, and (b) content that is racially or religiously hateful, incites violence and promotes or celebrates terrorist violence. Legal innovation has sought to make specific provision for such online offences, and offenders have been subject to prosecution in some widely-publicised cases. Nevertheless, as a whole, the business of regulating (identifying, blocking, removing and reporting) offending content has been left largely to social media providers themselves. This has been sustained by concerns both practical (the amount of public resource that would be required to police social media) and political (concerns about excessive state surveillance and curtailment of free speech in liberal democracies). However, growing evidence about providers' unwillingness and/or inability to effectively stem the flow of illegal and harmful content has created a crisis for the existing self-regulatory model. Consequently, we now see a range of proposals that would take a much more coercive and punitive stance toward media platforms, so as to compel them into taking more concerted action. Taking the UK as a primary focus, these proposals are considered and assessed, with a view to charting possible future configurations for tackling illegal social media content.

This article deals with current attempts by copyright industries (music, motion pictures and computer software) to challenge and criminalize practices of piracy and copyright theft, especially in relation to internet usage. A number of anti-piracy campaigns, all aimed at schoolchildren, are critically examined. It is argued that their advocacy of copyright and their corresponding objections to piracy rest on a number of rhetorical strategies which encode capitalist and individualist conceptions of property, creativity and rights. These strategies are elucidated and examined so as to draw attention to their contingent, partial and mythical character. Alternative understandings of intellectual expression are mobilized so as to delineate a case for legitimizing, rather than demonizing, cultural copying practices.

This paper deals with a topic heretofore largely neglected in studies of health and social policy, namely the challenge presented by the growing global trade in dangerous counterfeit medicines. Empirically, the scope and scale of this trade is assessed, along with its public health risks and impacts. Analytically, a range of social, political and economic processes are identified as contributing to this problem. These include the impact of on-going neo-liberal globalisation and the emergence of patent regimes that favour the developed over the developing nations. Current anti-counterfeiting policy initiatives, at both national and trans-national levels, are also critically examined. It is argued that such measures are unlikely to be effective unless combined with more radical challenges to the chronic lack of access to safe medicinal drugs in the developing world.