ABSTRACT
The prefix ‘e’ has become synonymous with the word ‘electronic’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. e-Commerce, e-Business, e-Economy, e-Government and so on are the stuff of the brave new world with its own SMS language: B2C, B2B, G2B, B2G. Sexed-up by politicians and commentators, the ‘e’ word appears to be the magical elixir the imbibing of which opens up the doors to the heavens of the information society and the knowledge economy. Over a decade ago, ‘electronic’ was a rather sexed-down and mundane term for a number of repetitive transactions that facilitated faster turnover time in business. The world then hadn't embraced the geeks of the developing software worlds as the social studs of our time. Indeed, back then the ‘e’ world was closely associated with the hedonistic rave culture centred on the drug Ecstasy. Sex and drugs and rock and roll may have been the leitmotif of the 1960s and 1970s, but by the time we arrive in the twenty-first century, we find that these pleasures are much more mediated through digital means so that they appear to take on a virtual reality of their own, and thus seem more manageable.
