Cyber studies is often bifurcated by a euphoria/pessimism divide focusing on questions like whether the Internet opens or closes conversation and community, is democratic or corporate-controlled, particularly around issues of copyright and intellectual property, or whether it produces new forums for expression or calcifies prevailing borders as well as establishing possibilities for surveillance.

"Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can't do with culture." [cit]