ABSTRACT
The new information environment actually does is to set the consideration of issues and approaches to problems in quite a different context. It is one in which we cannot tackle one issue, one question, or one problem at a time as an isolated item. The most abrupt and fundamentally important of the transitions which have led to our present world, developed in the late nineteenth century when experimental science began to extend its measurable range into the invisible, subsensorial world of atomic molecules and radiation phenomena. The pre-industrial producer of the resources supporting human society could count his wealth in piles of grain, numbers of cows and chickens, and could reckon for the numbers of people who could be maintained through the visible accounting and direct relationship of tangible assets. Many of our conceptual difficulties stem from the postulation of relative intangibility and indeterminacy.
