‘The idea of k.i.s.s. of the panopticon is to give people a quick, user-friendly, one-stop shopping guide to …cultural/critical theory (critical theory, cultural theory, media literacy, new media literacy, visual literacy) and its relationship with communications and new media, including the Internet. It might also help to get people thinking and maybe, just mebbe, provide a fresh perspective on how this stuff really affects our lives.

‘One of the cool things you might realize from this site (if you hadn’t already done so) is that a lot of the postmodern European intellectual stuff that sounded just plain crazy a few years ago is now actually starting to make sense in the age of the Internet. Baudrillard’s and Eco’s ideas on hyperreality, just to grab one example, suddenly seem a little more real and a lot clearer within the computer-mediated realm of hypertext and hyperlinks. At the same time, we need to understand the older paradigms of mass media and society (Marx and all that lot) before we can really get a grip on the “new” stuff. ‘