Today's world looks like no other that has gone before. Cars, televisions, air-conditioners, computers: objects unimaginable only a few generations ago, yet now so familiar as to make the idea of life without them almost as unimaginable. The simplest of activities depend on the unseen genius of hydro-electric turbines, cables overhead, underground and undersea, combine harvesters, satellites – all knit together by global flows of electronic information. This is a world populated by transgenic crops, cloned animals and humans conceived in test tubes. A world in which the already ill-fitting categories ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ will be of ever less help, where replacements for worn-out body parts may soon be grown from our tissue, and where surgeons and soldiers alike benefit from ever more powerful tools.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this world, however, is not the objects that fill it so much as the fact that change itself seems to be its unifying constant. The surfaces around us are altered ceaselessly in the race to keep up to date. Time seems to accelerate and space to shrink, as the basis of social order becomes mobility itself (Urry 2000). The proliferation of mobile telephones in little more than a decade, combined with their continual innovation and capacity for making fashion statements, tells a story typical of this world's capacity for social change, not to mention economic growth.