ABSTRACT
Imagination, when tinged with fear, often simplifies what it expects to recur. Yet the virtue of such imagination, if not of history, is to provide a cautionary tale. Delivery of newspaper or magazine by facsimile has been feasible for almost twenty-five years, but the cost has been high. In Great Britain, however, a number of different systems have been developed under the generic name of teletext. Just as in the impact of numerical control tools, the major change that may occur as a result of the “computerization” of knowledge work would be the redesign of the entire work process and the specification of the different kinds of analytical skills and functions which such knowledge activities have been designed to accomplish. The revolutions in transportation and communication create, inevitably, national societies and now, on the threshold, a world society.
