ABSTRACT
Telecommunication technologies, like newspapers, remove copresence as a necessary condition for communication, but unlike newspapers, they allow for bilateral relationships. Nearly everyone who occupies a central position in a modem social structure can quickly establish communicative contact with a multitude of distal persons. An entrepreneur in London can check his mailbox and answering machine for messages, fax a diagram to a branch office in Chicago, mail a postcard to his mother in Paris, telephone his wife in Stockholm, and then send a message by electronic mail to his business partner in Moscow. Chief executive officers of large organizations usually can establish bilateral communicative contact with most other members of their organizations in a few moments.
