None of these answers, it must be said, responds to the sense of excitement, fear and
challenge experienced by those who feel themselves on the edge of a revolution - the public,
journalists, policy-makers, pressure-groups, the media and information industry, the
government. More worryingly, while scepticism is always salutary, the discourses with which
researchers counter the widespread hype surrounding new media tends to become dystopian
or backward-looking. These discourses themselves might be more convincing if better
grounded empirically, but a considerable difficulty with the new media is precisely that they
are not yet here. Researchers cannot research them, users cannot use them and policy makers
cannot gauge their significance. Thus discourses of ‘what’s new’ rest less on experience than
on extrapolation from the past combined with speculation about the future.