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Reflexive Internet? The British experience 139kinds of example are specific to British research on the Internet. Yet theycapture a skepticism with regard to pronouncements about the Internet whichinforms and drives the research.To the extent that they will endure as a distinctive feature of the Britishexperience of Internet technologies, counter-intuition and analytic skepticismare likely to have important implications. We are often told that a “natural” andrecurrent trajectory of all new technology is initial hype followed by disappointment(the dot-com crash) and then the gradual accommodation andabsorption of the new technology into society and the economy. But could itbe that in the future the British will exhibit a more sophisticated response tothe onset of new technologies? Could the emerging tendency toward skepticismabout the Internet lead to a more considered and less overblown debateabout the prospects and pitfalls of the next network society?In Britain in the 1990s, much public discussion about new electronic technologiestook place as part of a series of (often government-sponsored) meetingsand events organized around the idea of discussing likely futuredevelopments in technology. Some of this was the direct consequence of theUK government Technology Foresight (later renamed simply Foresight) initiativesestablished to develop strategies for exploiting future new technologiesas they came on stream. These events brought together key technology developers,business interests, representatives of government, and academics. 6Often they centered on presentations and discussion of likely “future scenarios.”They predominantly featured the expression of speculative views aboutthe kinds of new technologies that might come on the scene in the next 10, 15,or 20 years. The presentations typically comprised descriptions, usuallyoffered by representatives of supply-side telecommunications companies, ofelectronic “gizmos,” such devices as intelligent remote domestic monitors (itwould be possible remotely to determine whether one had left the fridge open,or the oven on, or one could start warming the stove in advance of arrivinghome) or systems for expense claims (it would be possible to submit one’sexpense claims via satellite link while driving home from the airport).Overwhelmingly, one was struck by the ethnocentricity (the target usersseemed always to be middle-class, white, business men) and lack of imaginationembodied in these suggestions: key applications to meet the pressingneeds of twenty-first century British society these were not!However, on one memorable occasion, Richard Sykes, a former industrialist,made a quite different kind of presentation. The key characteristic of theBritish network society of 2015, he predicted, was one where the major andmost striking change would be the attitude of the population at large to newtechnologies. They would by that time be entirely unimpressed by theoverblown cyberbole associated with new technologies. They would resist themad rush to invest (literally and metaphorically) in the views propagated by