The following Essay was submitted in December 2001 and had to respond to the following passage of text. . . .

"I turn finally to the impact of technology on Western culture as thought in the middle 1930s, 1960s and 1990s and here again I will argue that; even as one moment leads to the next, each one comprehends the one before. Thus what Guy Debord sees in the spectacle of the 1960s are the technological transformations that alter Benjamin anticipated in the 1930s; and what cyberpunk writers extrapolate in the 1990s are the cybernetic extensions that Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s. In the discourse on Technology the terms attached to these moments project an ideological totality: the age of mechanical reproduction in the 1930s, the age of the cybernetic revolution in the 1960s, and the age of techno science or techno culture in the 1990s (in which research and development, or culture and technology, cannot be separated). Hal Foster, in "Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?", The Return of the Real, p.218

Elsewhere, Hal Foster describes this as "the relation between turns in critical models and returns of historical practices". I will be discussing this principle and its relevance to the idea of 'sex, pornography and the way we love' and its relation to contemporary media production.