ABSTRACT
Video, cable, and satellite technologies, and their attendant communication novelties-ways of transmitting entertainment, words, pictures, data, voices, and other services in huge variety, over vast distances, at ferocious speeds-have been discussed in such extravagant terms, and introduced with such little debate, that their wider social and economic implications have often been ignored. We are in danger of seeing emerging patterns as necessary, or even more dangerously as technologically determined, and accepting the consequences fatalistically.
