The rapid growth of multimedia technologies such as the Internet, e-mail and digital television holds the promise of a new "information age" that caters to individual tastes and creates new wealth. But are new media technologies really designed to achieve these utopian aims? Addressing such issues, Multimedia: A Critical Introduction provides a historical, cultural and political context to the development of multimedia as both a technology and a concept. Individual chapters discuss the origins of multimedia in the unlikely interaction between the military and 1960s counter-culture; the wide-ranging effects of the deregulation of media industries by the "new right" governments in the 1980s; issues of privacy and censorship; and the use of digital technology to create special effects in films.