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According to many social scientists and technologists, we live in a world that is radically different from that experienced by our ancestors. This ‘new world’ is due in part to the rapid growth of communication technologies such as cable and satellite television, fax machines and multimedia computers, and the growing data networks sometimes called the ‘information superhighway’. The ease of communication between different parts of the world and different parts of society afforded by such technology is leading, some social scientists claim, to changed social relationships, to new social groupings and dispersed communities, and to altered perceptions of time and space. The world is increasingly experienced (at least by those with access to the new technology) as a smaller, more compressed place-a kind of ‘global village’, as the visionary 1960s’ writer Marshall McLuhan (1962) put it.