| This dissertation examines the cultural discourse surrounding the primary domestic electric communication technologies—telephone, radio, television, and Internet—in order to trace the social construction of a powerful recurring discursive formation: the discourse of fear created around each technological system as a breach of the defenses of the home, allowing the threat of sexual predation to endanger its inhabitants, especially children. The discourse of fear was woven into each technological system early in its development, providing an instrumentalist base for struggles over each technology's social and legal boundaries. Each technology's threat in turn was claimed as inherently singular, the worst yet technological and sexual disruption to the sanctity of the home and the child. This project examines the historical links between these claims of singularity, revealing the way in which this particular fear narrative has been articulated, reiterated, and asserted as unique, generation after generation, to demonize and sexualize successive waves of communication technology. |
