ABSTRACT
The new information and communications technologies are changing not just entertainment and leisure pursuits but, potentially, all spheres of society: work (robotics, office technology); political management; policing and military activities (electronic warfare); communication; education (distance learning); consumption (electronic funds transfer, new retailing technologies). If the combined, though disaggregated, forces of corporate capital and political interests succeed in the systematic introduction of these new technologies-from robotics and data banks to the Internet and virtual reality games, then social life will be transformed in almost all aspects. The strategic development of ICTs will, then, have reverberations throughout the social structures of advanced capitalist societies.
