6.10.1 To start with, here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organisations and I can tell you that within six months two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way. (Fuller,1969, pg.167)

6.10.2 No one imagined that the programs developed would still be used when 99 rolled over to 00. We now live in a collective anxiety of that moment. Will the phones stop ringing and planes stop flying and money markets start crashing at 12:01, January 1, 2000? Countries have mobilised to prevent chaos, shelves in bookstores are dedicated to ever increasing publications on the subject, legal firms are gearing up for a profitable year involving the bug. Most frightening scenarios involve the networks and even if a disaster does not take place, many are considering much more seriously the implications of networked existence.

6.10.3 As we expand our horizons and our field of influence through communication media, so we compress the time we have. In The Postmodern Condition, social geographer and theorist David Harvey (1989) refers frequently to time-space compression: processes that so revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. (pg. 240) Harvey finds such compression central to understanding the now commonplace (and perhaps dated) concepts of the world as a global village or spaceship earth. [top]