Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy.

New York, NY New Press, 2007. Hardcover First Ed; First Printing indicated. First Ed; First Printing indicated. Very Good+ in Very Good+ DJ: Both book and DJ show only minor indications of use. Book shows light shelfwear; single page dog-eared; binding shows the slightest lean, while remaining perfectly secure; text clean. DJ shows moderate rubbing; price unclipped. Overall, close to 'As New'. NOT a Remainder. NOT a Book-Club Edition. NOT an Ex-Library copy. 8vo. 282pp. Hardback with DJ. How is it, the author asks, that every new communications technology, from radio to cable television, is hailed as the one that will make the media more democratic and then is almost immediately subverted (or perhaps perverted) by politics and big business? Chester, a longtime critic of media commercialization, explores how the newest technological breakthroughs, the digital media, could spell further disaster. Do we really want television sets that monitor what we watch? Or an Internet that knows what sites we visit and reports back to advertising companies? Do we want to see newspapers, television stations, and radio stations in the hands of massive corporations that control what we see and what we think? After scaring the bejeebers out of us, Chester concludes with a "policy agenda for the broadband era" in which he puts forward some badly needed reforms, such as strict rules governing the collection of information on the Internet; regulations limiting how many media a single company can own; and a complete overhaul of the FCC, to turn it from a "corporate lapdog" into a genuine communications watchdog. Cautionary tale is too weak a term for this angry call for democracy, fairness, and a little old-fashioned common sense.