ABSTRACT
The husband of one of my friends bought an old farmhouse in Italy a couple of years ago and began to restore it. He is an academic jet-setter: lives in England, is a visiting scholar three months of the year at MIT, and regularly travels to Japan, Italy, and other places to lecture, attend conferences, and act as consultant. Once he had made a room of his Italian farmhouse habitable, he installed a FAX machine. Immediately, he could be in touch with his colleagues in Europe, America, and Japan. He could exchange drafts of papers, make arrangements for meetings, plan conferences, edit proofs, and otherwise communicate with his book editors. His wife complains that he installed the FAX machine in the master bedroom; she does not like being wakened in the middle of the night as the machine beeps and cranks out communications from across the world. But on the whole, he has easily absorbed this technology into his lifestyle.
