 Winston shows how the law can be used as a model for describing the life cycle of many communications technologies.His approach is in particular directed against technological determinism and instead proposes that the emergence of new media and new technologies is mediated and controlled by society.According to Winston, a supervening social necessity creates a need for a particular technology, but the law of the suppression of radical potential means that new technology will be integrated into the status quo as opposed to radically disrupting it.