Coda

Abstract

The Coda compares the initial excitement about the democratic possibilities of the internet in the twenty-first century—and subsequent fears concerning the political effects of social media and the resurgence of populism—with nineteenth-century responses to the proliferation of printed paper. It likens the early Victorian debates about allowing the reporting of debates to experiments with regulating communication through Twitter and Facebook. It then reveals how recent events have refocused our attention on both representative democracy and the book as fragile formations. It links recent proposals for adjusting the effects of social media to Dickens’s own efforts on copyright. Finally, it shows how Dickens’s satirical proposals anticipated dystopian aspects of our current world of smartphones and the attention economy.