ABSTRACT
So far we have focused on various affordances and constraints of digital media and explored how these affect the ways people do things, make meanings, manage their relationships with others, construct their identities and think. In this chapter we will take a more critical stance towards digital technologies, attempting to discover how these affordances and constraints embed particular ideologies and the agendas of particular people or groups. The word ‘critical’ as we are using it here doesn’t mean that you need to find fault with digital media or the practices people engage in with it. What we really mean by a critical stance is a conscious stance – a stance that puts you in the position to ‘interrogate’ the ideologies and agendas promoted in the texts that you encounter via digital media and by digital media themselves.
