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To show how a consumerist anaesthetic is masking the pain of crumbling public education, health and libraries, it is necessary to intervene in the narratives of hyper-individualism, personal choice and the digital divide. By aligning postcolonialism, internet studies and media studies, I probe the consequences of the information glut and the fetishization of the new rather than the useful. This is an article of advocacy and argument, exploring how our language, models and metaphors for the online environment have become descriptive rather than innovative and interventionist.
Tara Brabazon (2012) studied this question.