In the previous chapters we discussed the internet's use as a medium of mass communication with immense potential for promoting democracy and also its use as a journalistic tool.

Since the number of net users has been swelling and technological novelties have been proliferating, negative developments like the dotcom crash are easily forgotten and many writers adopt an ecstatic tone while dealing with the net. This becomes self-serving when these pieces appear in online publications, which is often the case.

But the student of e-journalism, whether he is training to be a journalist or studying the subject as part of an academic course, needs to understand what the net actually can and cannot do. This chapter presents a brief discussion on this, with the emphasis on what the net cannot do and why.

Determinism

The enthusiastic tone of journalists in discussion on the prospects of the online medium is not the result of numbers alone. Its origin lies in technological determinism. Technological determinism is “(a) theory of social change … in which productive technique obeys a logic or trajectory of its own; and, in the process, acts as the principal determinant of institutions and social relationships.”

It is not as if writers adopt such a theory through conscious choice, though this may be the case for some individuals with expert knowledge. People usually have this type of attitude as part of their ideology, that is, the socially constituted system of meanings within which they automatically interpret facts and phenomena.