ABSTRACT
The richer and more industrially advanced societies are sometimes described as postmodern, sometimes as post-industrial or even post-cultural. The informatization process brings both technological and cultural change; it speeds up the development of devices for storing, processing, and communicating information, and it also causes a shift in ways of thinking about information itself. The conceptual shift has many facets, one of which is a growing appreciation of information as a resource. One remarkable information revolution, the true beginning of electronic communication, was launched with the invention of the telegraph in the middle of the nineteenth century. Whenever a new communications technology comes along, somebody declares that it has made distance irrelevant. Although some skeptics believe the information-age rhetoric is seriously overblown and doubt that the lot of the world's poor and downtrodden can be significantly improved by access to the Internet, they are in the minority.
