"THE FUTURE of information technology descends upon us in a swarm of buzzwords: global village, electronic superhighway, information age, electronic frontier. Someday soon, cyberspace--the vast, intangible territory where computers meet and exchange information--will be populated with electronic communities and businesses."".
Daniel Chandler, Shaping and Been Shaped, Engaging with the Media , 1993.
This quote was describing the future in when it was written. That was ten years ago and the time it was describing is now. The buzzwords' it uses, global village, electronic superhighway and electronic frontier now seem clichéd and naff. We now live in a world where they are the norm, an everyday thing. People can now interact with others from all over the world using the Internet. Huge libraries of information on every topic imaginable can be read. It has made to world a smaller place and has changed the way we live and work in it. Also mobile communication has had a huge affect over how we live and work also. Technology such as mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, means that we are constantly online. They have cut out the need to sit at a computer and dial up a connection. .
"Freedom from the physical body.freedom from race and gender, from nationality and personality, from place and time. Communicating by cellular phone, and hand-held computer, PDA, built-in fax modem, we can relate to each other as pure consciousness.".
Quote from the film Disclosure, 1994.
As these types of technology merge they are creating a situation where the distinction between the real world' and the online world' is becoming more and more blurred. We now have to ask ourselves. Is this what we want? Will it make our lives better? Will it help lead us to a time of technological utopianism'? Or will it in fact lead to a technological anti-utopianism?.
Telecommunications has given many workers the ability to work at home, or at least complete certain work related tasks from home.