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Forget the Internet and digital age; July 2011 was dominated by an old tabloid newspaper, the News of the World. In case you missed it, James Murdoch announced the paper would close on 7^th July after 168 years in print. One private investigator and the paper’s royal editor were jailed in 2007 for illegally hacking into the mobile phone messages of members of the royal family. Large sums were also reportedly paid to several high-profile personalities and celebrities to settle other phone hacking claims before they came to court. An ongoing police investigation revealed up to 4,000 people’s phones may have been illegally hacked, including that of a murder victim during the time she was actually missing.

But what tactics are legitimate for journalists in search of a story? Does it depend on the story or the targets? How much information, personal or otherwise, should be in the public domain? The Daily Telegraph paid for stolen information on the details of MPs’ expense claims and was widely praised for publishing it. But it was still stolen information, wasn’t it? BBC’s Panorama programme uncovered serious abuses of patients with learning difficulties at a care home in Bristol. But this involved someone posing as a care worker who secretly filmed the abuse. Again, was this legitimate? Is hacking mobile phones also legitimate if it reveals information that is ‘in the public interest’? And who decides what the public interest is, anyway?          

Which brings us to Wikileaks. Founded in December 2006, the website allows anyone to submit material anonymously, mainly classified or restricted documents, videos and so on. This welter of material is then assessed by Wikileaks reviewers who decide what to publish online. Anonymity of submission encourages whistle-blowers in sensitive positions to contribute. Founder Julian Assange sees Wikileaks as a radical opening up of information so that people can see what is done in their name. In his words: ‘We are an intelligence agency of the people, casting pearls before swine.’

By making available military documents, secret diplomatic communications, email conversations and much more, Wikileaks opens up the behind-the-scenes machinery of international diplomacy and realpolitik.

Many governments see Wikileaks’ radical openness as dangerous and irresponsible. Web-hosting companies and financial firms such as Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, have withdrawn their services. Has it compromised national security? Has it put soldiers and undercover operations in danger? Could it ruin personal relationships in international relations and damage trade links? The ‘information age’ wasn’t meant to include this, was it?   

Sociologically though, Wikileaks fits perfectly into the global age. Sociologists used to talk of the zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the times’, an indefinable cultural ethos in specific periods. This concept has fallen out of favour, maybe because it has too many ‘spiritual’ undertones for an empirical social science. But it is still helpful. One way of tapping into the zeitgeist is to look at specific trends which coalesce into an overall pattern. Wikileaks is part of a growing trend towards freedom of information and open communication, which can be found in many other areas of social life. Here are a few examples.

Job applicants can request to see ‘confidential’ references, local and national government make policy documents and expense claims publicly available online and freedom of information requests can uncover the salaries of public employees. Confessional TV encourages people to share their deepest secrets and reality TV broadcasts the minutiae of contestants’ everyday (but contrived) lives in real time. Tracy Emin’s ‘confessional art’ turns everyday experience into artworks, laying bare the intimate details of the artist’s life. Open-plan offices, open-plan interiors for homes, glass sheets replacing solid walls and large, open kitchen-diners are all de rigueur. Light is good, dark is bad. Giddens, Beck and others have also explored the way that frank and open communication has moved to the centre of intimate relationships. Mutual disclosure is demanded as a sign of trust and not to disclose brings mistrust and enmity.   

But is complete openness necessarily good? The News of the World scandal suggests there may be limits. Richard Sennett saw the demand for openness and mutual disclosure as vestiges of Gemeinschaft, those community values and bonds that Ferdinand Tönnies described as authentic, solid and stable compared to the loose, fleeting mere associations (Gesellschaft) that typify urban life. Sennett argued that a return to small-scale life on the land is not realistic, but the Gemeinschaft ideal persists, mutated into the desire for open communication. Yet under modern conditions this ideal is destructive, infiltrating public life and politics, turning politicians into celebrities assessed on their personal qualities (as presented on TV), not their policies or what they actually do in power.                 

The ideal of entirely open relations, said Sennett, mistakenly assumes that the self is a box of delights, rather than the cabinet of horrors we all know it to be. Can we really handle hearing everything that others think, feel and say about us, however nasty or distressing? Anyone who has sent a ‘private’ email to the ‘wrong’ person, or indeed received one, will understand the problem. Not everything we think about each other ought to be out in the open. How else can people who don’t necessarily like each other get along well enough to work together for a common good? Some things are best kept to ourselves if there’s to be any sort of liveable, civilized life for us all.

Sennett’s argument cuts against the grain of the Zeitgeist. Can international diplomacy survive the opening up of every email, letter and phone call to public scrutiny? Will open communication improve our political culture? Will the Wikileaks principle enhance our freedoms or poison the emerging global society? Over the next few years it seems, we are about to find out. 

Development of the mass media and the digital revolution are discussed in Chapter 17, The Media. Sociological theories of intimate relations are covered in Chapter 9, Families and Intimate Relationships, especially pp. 329-31 and 371-6. Tönnies’s ideas of Gemeinschaft are briefly outlined on pp. 208-9.                       

Philip W. Sutton

Here are two recent cases involving the new forms of social media – those Internet-based media (Facebook, Delicious, YouTube) that facilitate conversation and networking with content provided by the users. In the first case, a married, world-famous British football player allegedly has a seven-month-long affair with a former Big Brother housemate. The affair ends and the player takes out an injunction preventing the housemate and a tabloid newspaper from revealing his identity. However, a user of the social media site Twitter names the player in a tweet and soon his name is all over the ‘Twittersphere’. Suspecting that the original culprit is a journalist trying to get around the injunction, the player’s solicitor demands that Twitter furnish them with the identity of the whistle-blower; Twitter considers it. Meanwhile, in the House of Commons no less, a Liberal Democrat MP, John Hemming (we can name him), uses the device of ‘parliamentary privilege’ – which allows him to name names with legal impunity – to name the player in the Commons. As newspapers are allowed to report on all matters in Parliament, the cat is well and truly out of the bag and the player is named.

In the second, lesser-reported tale, an English council, South Tyneside, took legal action in California (the home of Twitter) in relation to an anonymous blogger, ‘Mr Monkey’, who had allegedly made libellous statements of drug use, sexual activity and corruption about three councillors and a council official. The council says it took the action because it has a duty of care towards its employees and seeks to defend its own interests. Are these everyday stories of twenty-first-century celebrity and public culture? Maybe, but they also show us something of the ambiguous character of the new social media we all think we understand so well.

What these cases show is that there is no agreed, widespread interpretation of what the status of social media like Twitter or Facebook really is. Twitter users often describe their activity as a modern version of the very ancient art of gossiping over the garden fence or down the local pub. If so, then trying to prevent online gossip through legal means is just as likely to succeed as barristers trying to intervene to prevent my neighbour leaning over the fence on a Sunday afternoon to tell me the local ‘news’. Indeed, as a season ticket holder at the football player’s club, I and several hundred, maybe thousands of other fans had heard the sorry tale a long time before it made the Twittersphere. This was but via the more usual avenue of fans and stewards gossiping about ‘seeing him out with her’ or ‘hearing it from a reliable source’ close to the player. This genuinely is gossip – passed on from person to person, usually through face-to-face communication, though these days also via mobile phone calls or text messaging. This method is still quite slow in spreading the news and the veracity of the information remains unconfirmed at best.

However, things are quite different with social media. Once the football player was named on Twitter, the information spread rapidly and an estimated 75,000 people tweeted the player’s name, many in protest at the legal request for the original whistle-blower to be named. This was Twitter’s ‘I am Spartacus!’ moment. Social media are different from gossip in other ways too. Twitter, for instance, operates through written content and is therefore not directly comparable with old-fashioned gossip delivered through speech. Posting messages on Twitter is closer to writing an open letter to a newspaper or sending an email to everyone in your and all your friends’ address books. Because it’s written down, it may also be considered differently in law. The offence of defamation is slander when spoken, but libel when written down, for example. It appears that legal systems are currently running behind popular interpretations of social media as purely gossip forums, and may even be at odds with the views of social media users. More clashes between the two appear inevitable.

What was the response of Twitter to these two cases? In the first, the player’s legal bid was made in England not the US, which meant that Twitter did not have to provide names and identities. However, if the request was made in the US then Twitter admitted it would have to co-operate with the request. So far, a pragmatic acceptance of reality and the need to start burying the story seem to have prevailed. Twitter’s European head, Tony Wang, also warned, at a meeting of the e-G8 forum in Paris, that the site would hand over information when required by courts and that users would have to defend themselves if they broke privacy injunctions.

In the second case, the council’s request for the blogger’s identity was accepted and Twitter did release the information, though it forewarned one suspect, giving them 21 days to lodge a legal argument against the action before releasing their details. Twitter provides a platform for social networking and ‘gossip’, but don’t expect it to fight your legal cases. Google’s annual reports show that it also receives literally thousands of requests from agencies in the USA, UK and elsewhere for user data, such as IP addresses, email addresses and mobile phone numbers, though these do not attract much interest in the press.    

There is a simple conclusion to be drawn: social media are part of, and not separate from, the rest of society. This is such a trite sociological proposition that it may seem unnecessary. However, the experience of using and being part of social media can convey a feeling that these sites are global, open communication spaces that exist outside or beyond grounded social reality in some totally free, open cyberworld. Yet of course, the servers that host the sites really do exist physically within nation-state boundaries and are subject to the laws that operate in those national contexts. I am reminded of a comment made by one of my old lecturers during a discussion of virtual worlds and the advent of virtual reality suits, helmets and gloves that allow people to see and experience virtual reality scenarios in real time: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but all I see is a person moving around wearing gloves and a hat.’ In short, the virtual world depends for its very existence on the ‘real one’.  

Chapter 17 The Media is the obvious place to explore these issues, though Internet use is also covered on pp. 816-7, and social interaction in cyberspace on pp. 275-6. Facebook features on pp. 821-2, and information technology and social change on pp. 122, 125-6.

 

For an interesting and readable study of Facebook and the roles it plays in contemporary social life, you might be interested in taking a look at Daniel Miller’s Tales from Facebook. You can see the author introduce the book here.

Philip W. Sutton

Some natural and social scientists seem to love the media, especially television. One of the most often seen is atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins who has fronted several TV series and is regularly seen on news programmes debating Darwinian evolutionary theory and religion. As Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University (1995-2008), Dawkins rose to prominence as a public intellectual advocating evolutionary theory, as well as the sternest public critic of what he sees as divisive religious schools, unquestioning religious faith and fundamentalisms of all kinds. [The website of Dawkins’ Foundation can be seen here.] Biology is more than adequately represented in the media with David Attenborough’s numerous wildlife programmes and a host of other presenters, too. Historians Simon Schama and Michael Wood are TV regulars as are numerous archaeologists, psychologists, criminologists, astronomers, economists and political scientists. But where are all the sociologists? And does it matter that we don’t regularly see sociology represented in the media?

It wouldn’t be an issue if the academic ‘ivory tower’ was still standing and sociology could continue on its merry way blissfully separated from the rest of society. But some sociologists have seen the separation of professional, scientific sociology from a much broader public sociology as a key and contentious issue for the discipline in the future. Michael Burawoy of the University of California has forcibly argued that professional sociology has become distanced from the concerns of ‘ordinary people’ and must re-engage with politics, social movements and shifting class inequalities in an era of neoliberal economic dominance. Not to do so runs the risk of irrelevance, but also gives all those other disciplines a free reign. This is ironic as many older sociologists today were drawn to the subject in the 1970s precisely because it seemed to have so much to say, much of it critical, about the direction society was taking.

Burawoy actually sees four types of sociology: professional and public sociologies, policy sociology and critical sociology. [You can read Burawoy’s mission statement here.] The first two have attracted most attention. For Burawoy and others, public sociology is opposed to but also dependent on professional or scientific sociology, both of which exist in a relationship of ‘antagonistic interdependence’. Detached, scientific sociology produces research methods, empirical evidence and theories, which are necessary for public sociology’s engagement with non-academic audiences. But unlike professional sociology, the public version opens up a genuine dialogue with those audiences, thus allowing the discipline to be partly shaped by the concerns of non-sociologists. Of course this is a very stark dividing line and in practice much scientific sociology today does try hard to engage with its audiences. And critics are right to point out that there is a risk of sociology being subordinated to political ideologies. Nonetheless, the basic idea that professional sociology does not do enough to engage with wider public concerns and political debate seems to me broadly correct. One aspect of this is the lack of a media presence for sociology.

To understand the problem of the invisible sociologists we have to grasp the general tenor of sociological studies of the media. For many, probably most sociologists, mass media forms are never neutral channels for the transmission of information and knowledge. In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan showed us that the medium doesn’t just carry our messages, but in fact ‘the medium is the message’. Hence, television requires us to watch from our armchairs inculcating passivity and an uncritical acceptance of the status quo. According to Neil Postman (1985) it’s also completely unsuited to serious matters, but is brilliant at ‘entertainment’, so good that TV reduces all news and political debate to an entertainment format, which thus depoliticizes and sanitizes it. Even worse, Marxist critics such as the Glasgow Media Group saw systematic bias in TV news against workers, strikers and less-powerful social groups and an inbuilt positive bias supporting political elites and the establishment. In the 1990s, French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard pushed these critiques to a logical conclusion, arguing that the mass media doesn’t just represent social life and politics but is complicit in creating it. We now live and are trapped within hyperreality (reality + its representations), a complex mix of ‘real-world’ events and media images and reports.

The upshot of all this is that most sociologists have a deep-seated mistrust of the media, particularly television, which makes them loath to engage with it on its own terms, fearing crude misrepresentation or the trivializing of their ideas. But the end result is a notable absence of sociologists in the mass media and a diminishing influence in shaping public consciousness. Whilst other disciplines have become familiar and expected parts of news programmes, political debate shows and documentaries, sociology has become publicly invisible to the wider population. Is this problematic? Some think it is. The lack of a public presence is damaging to the general awareness of sociological theories and evidence in many public debates. It’s no coincidence that the rising adoption of simplistic applications based on evolutionary psychology or individualistic arguments have taken place against this backdrop. If sociologists shun the media they can’t really complain when public and political debates are dominated by non-sociological theories and evidence.

Media invisibility also has a practical impact, for instance, on the course choices of students and therefore the viability of sociology departments and staff groups. If sociology loses out to psychology, criminology and political science then there will simply be fewer sociologists in the long run. Probably the most damaging aspect though is the possibility that the sociological imagination, that hard-won and crucially important ability to connect private troubles and public issues, will wither amongst the wider public, allowing individualistic ‘explanations’ of social phenomena to gain ground once again. The first line of defence must be for sociologists to swallow their professional pride and shelve their legitimate concerns about the media just long enough to enable the discipline to gain a public presence that will keep alive our distinctive sociological perspective in public and political debates.

Chapter 17 covers the sociology of the media and includes an extended discussion of media theories on pp. 774-57. The sociological imagination from C. Wright Mills onwards is discussed on pp. 3-9. The issue of sociology and science can be found on pp. 37-46.

Philip W. Sutton

The outcome of the forthcoming British General Election on May 6^th seemed a formality just 10 days ago. David Cameron’s Conservatives had been well ahead in the polls for a long time and looked a safe bet to gain a working majority. The only issue was how large that majority would be. The Labour Party was running well behind, with the Liberal Democrats even further adrift, whilst the backdrop of recession, public spending cuts and a static property market appeared to offer little to get excited about. That all changed with the first ever televised debate between the three main party leaders on 15^th April. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, previously seen as an inexperienced lightweight who had been largely invisible in the campaign, came out of the debate the clear winner, sending the polls, Gordon Brown and David Cameron into a tailspin.

On 6^th April the BBC’s averaged ‘poll of polls’ showed the Conservatives on 39%, Labour at 31% and Lib Dems way behind on just 19%. But five days after the first televised debate, the same averaged poll had the Conservatives on 33%, Labour on 28% and the Lib Dems in second place on 30%. An astonishing turnaround in such a short period. How did Clegg do it? Well, he did give a very naturalistic performance in the debate and was able to skilfully present his party as offering something genuinely new compared to the other two ‘dinosaur parties’ of British politics. Brown gave some detailed answers and offered more substantive content, but his presentation was widely seen as poor, failing to properly engage with the audience. Cameron was surprisingly nervous, failed to match Brown’s detail and substance and, crucially, seemed unable to deflect Clegg’s interpretation of the Conservatives as part of the old, failed politics. Given the enormous amount of discussion on how this would be the first British ‘Internet election’ where blogs, tweets and viral campaigns would dominate, it is ironic that it took just 90 minutes of good, old-fashioned television to transform the whole campaign. And with two more TV debates to come, there’s plenty of scope for more twists and turns yet. [Watch the first debate here.]

However, Clegg’s good performance only struck a chord due to the underlying fragility of voting intentions as reflected in the polls, and which can be attributed to continuing public outrage at revelations from the MPs expense claims debacle. The attitude of ‘a plague on all your houses’ has led to a softening of people’s commitment to the two main parties and a subsequent openness to alternative messages. In particular, Clegg was able to present himself as something new, a force for change, and that apparently rare thing, an ‘honest politician’ who tells it like it is. In part this was due to the fact that he had previously been quite invisible to most voters who wouldn’t even have recognized him as the leader of a major political party. To them, he really was a breath of fresh air, though whether he will still look that way on 6^th May is another matter. Apparently, 90 minutes is now a long time in British politics.

The main loser has been David Cameron’s Tories. Avoiding detailed policy announcements, talking in vague generalities and bashing Gordon Brown worked well initially and, in a two-party system, only the Conservatives could realistically suggest they could become the next government. But as the election got closer, this should have been bolstered with a raft of much more detailed policies to firm up the Tory message. That just didn’t happen. Hence, in the TV debate David was hopelessly outmanoeuvred by Clegg, who hammered home the message that he had no idea what the Conservatives stood for any more. Strategies that worked in a dyadic relationship (two parties) now look outmoded as we move into a genuinely triadic one (three parties). As Georg Simmel (one of the first German sociologists) observed, a three-party relationship offers possibilities for new alliances, shifting allegiances and a kind of fluidity that simply cannot exist within a dyad. For example, although they are bitter enemies, the dyad of Labour and Conservatives at Westminster also produces that place’s atmosphere of an ‘insiders only’ club, something that many blame for expenses claims abuses. Given the Lib Dem challenge to the Labour–Conservative dominance, we can now expect to see Labour and the Tories reframing their main messages as the campaign moves on.

This election, perhaps more than most, has focused on the very vague and, you may think, quite empty notion of ‘change’. The parties have clearly taken a leaf from Barack Obama’s campaign in the USA which used the slogan ‘change we can believe in’. The Conservatives’ slogan is ‘Vote for Change’; Clegg and the Lib Dems use ‘change that works for you’; whilst the incumbent Brown’s Labour Party has ‘a future fair for all’. Well, it makes little sense for the party that’s been in power for 13 years to campaign for change now does it? But what do such vacuous slogans mean? What change? Change of what, for what reason and how? [You can see a discussion here.]

The use of general notions of fairness, justice, progress or change in election campaigns aims to tap into what Vilfredo Pareto (a turn-of-the-century Italian economist and sociologist) called ‘residues’ – those stable and unchanging, deep-seated sentiments that lie beneath the surface of rational debate. Pareto calls the rational arguments and explanations ‘derivations’. Hence, in the struggle for political power in democracies, politicians create derivations (arguments about the need for change or stability, for example) which appeal to basic human residues or ‘instincts’ in order to attract mass support. In the present economic and political climate, therefore, it makes perfect sense to go on endlessly about the need for change even if you don’t explain in any detail what such change might amount to. And this is David’s new problem. Nick Clegg, not Cameron, is now seen as embodying this most important element of the campaign and, whilst that continues, we are heading for a hung or ‘balanced’ parliament and a period of triadic rather than dyadic politics.

Chapter 22 on politics contains much relevant material on elections and political parties and is the logical place to start, especially pp. 988-92. British party politics can be found on pp. 1003-6. Democracy and its spread cross the world are covered on pp. 992-9 along with a Box on the Internet as a democratizing force. The impact and use of media is then included on pp. 725-44.

Philip W. Sutton

Last week, Google, the company behind the world’s most popular search engine, announced that it is considering pulling out of China after discovering that the Gmail accounts of campaigners for human rights in China had been attacked [Google statement here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html?]. Google said only two accounts had actually been accessed and very limited information gained, but ‘at least twenty’ other large companies had been attacked and campaigners based in China, the US and Europe had their accounts attacked via ‘phishing’ scams and malware. No firm accusation was made against the Chinese authorities, but the implication of Google’s statement is that, having traced the source of these highly organized and well-orchestrated attacks to China, government sources are attempting to garner information on human rights activism. As a result, the company says it is no longer willing to censor its search results in China (Google.cn).

Google’s championing of the right to ‘freedom of search’ rings pretty hollow for some who have tracked the company’s move into the Chinese market. Google first opened in China in January 2006 but, in order to do so, also agreed to censor some search terms to meet Chinese laws on Internet use; these included search terms that would bring up material on controversial topics, such as ‘Tiananmen’ (the site in Beijing of the massacre of protesters by the Chinese military in 1989), ‘Falun Gong’ (a banned spiritual movement whose followers have allegedly been persecuted by the Chinese government) and ‘Dalai Lama’ (a Buddhist spiritual leader revered in Tibet, a disputed Chinese territory). Critics saw the company putting profit before human rights in a move that was also against the company motto – ‘don’t be evil’. Google, though, saw it as constructive engagement with the Chinese government in order to help promote civil liberties and change China’s stance on freedom and openness. The latest episode appears to be an acknowledgement that this policy has failed, although Google says it will still sit down with the authorities soon to see if an agreement on an uncensored search engine can be found before it pulls out of China altogether. Cynics also point out that China’s most popular search engine is not Google, which has only around 31% market share, but a Chinese engine, Baidu, with around 64% (in Chinese: http://www.baidu.com/). Has Google found it more difficult to break into China and not achieved the kind of profits it was looking for? Does that mean the Chinese gamble has not been worth the damage done to Google’s corporate brand in the rest of the world (‘we’re good not evil’)? 

Is this issue really as obvious as Google’s rather simplistic good and evil view of the world suggests? Chinese censorship, especially political censorship, is undoubtedly extensive and the overall system has been described as the Great Firewall of China for good reason. The BBC, which has suffered an almost complete ban, says that around 50,000 Chinese authorities spend all of their time monitoring Internet traffic. But government secret services around the world, including those in the USA and Europe, routinely monitor communications, email exchanges and blogs, particularly of anyone suspected of involvement in extremism and terrorist activity in our age of a ‘new’ terrorism and heightened security fears. Similarly, search engines screen out certain results in order to comply with, say, child protection laws in the UK. Are these good or evil practices? At a lower level, anyone who has tried to carry out research knows that even university IT systems operate with lists of proscribed websites, sometimes including legal organizations such as the British National Party, that are not freely available to students or staff without special dispensation. Monitoring, intervention and censorship on the worldwide web is widespread and freedom of search doesn’t exist even in the ‘free’ West. Whether it should is, of course, another matter.

There is also a tendency amongst commentators in the West to unthinkingly assume that Chinese users of the web are the passive victims of state censorship, imbibing government propaganda in a fairly uncritical way. Such a view comes close to the old hypodermic syringe theories of media content, which are seen today as rather naïve and one-dimensional. The more recent body of work under the general rubric of audience studies, making use of interpretative models and theories, has shown that audiences and users are active interpreters, not passive sponges, reading between the lines and adopting a cynical approach to media messages. This is even more the case with new media such as the Internet, which demand active engagement from users. Those using search engines to find specific information become skilled at finding it and don’t give up their information-foraging easily.  

A nice empirical study carried out by James Lull in the late 1990s explored 100 Chinese families’ attitudes and approaches to television, which had been rolled out across the country in the 1980s. He found that, in similar ways to populations in the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe, Chinese audiences knew full well that what they saw and heard was heavily censored and included much propaganda, but they were able to filter and interpret it through their own knowledge of society and wider international relations in order to make sense of it. They were extremely sensitive to how news is presented and how it’s delivered, what’s been left out and which issues are accorded priority. In all likelihood, this kind of active interpretation and critical reception is even more widespread in web searching, Internet use and information retrieval. None of which means that extreme political censorship of the web is not an issue of concern, but it does mean that many of China’s 360 million Internet users are unlikely to be as surprised as Google seems to be at the latest revelations of state surveillance and intervention. 

Chapter 17 on Media is the starting point for debates on Internet use. ICTs and globalization is covered in Chapter 4, pp.127-131. Postmodern theories of society focusing on the impact of media are in Chapter 3, pp.96-8. Chapter 7 on social interaction includes social constructionism and cyberspace (pp.273-6), and US ‘televangelism’ is covered in Chapter 16 on pp.702-6. Technology in schools can be found in Chapter 19, pp.870-7, whilst cybercrimes are discussed in Chapter 21, pp.970-4.