It may seem strange at this stage to put a question mark at the end of the title of this last section. There is, however, a real question to be answered. Throughout this book, there has been an emphasis on fundamental continuities as well as profound change. The step from cuneiform to computer was a huge one, encompassing almost the whole consciously recorded history of mankind, and yet in another sense it was not so great. Our remote ancestors who recorded their activities and tried to control their systems of government were responding to the same instincts and imperatives that still drive us today. We have developed previously unimaginable technologies, and new techniques to accompany them, and perhaps we are more systematic in our approach to our use of them, but is the change really more significant than the continuity? If ours is an ‘information society’, was not the same true of ancient Babylon?

Implicit in the use of the phrase is the suggestion that the information society is a product of the use of computers and other electronic and audiovisual media. In this narrower sense, change has clearly been fundamental. Devices that are now part of our everyday lives – telephones, televisions, computers – were invented within the last 100 years or so and have clearly transformed the way we live and work. That transformation took place within a timescale as short as a decade in many aspects of office management, telecommunications and some forms of television broadcasting. It will continue, for there is every reason to suppose that the pace of change in the immediate future will be as fast as it has been in the immediate past. Indeed, experience and historical precedent would suggest that the pace will, if anything, increase.

Much of this book has been concerned with the consequences of these changes. We have traced the development and impact of a market-place in which information and the media that carry it are commodities to be traded between suppliers and consumers. We have considered some of the social and political issues that have arisen out of the existence of the market-place and the demand for information that created and sustains it. Some of these issues are new, but many are old, although they have been redefined as a consequence of technological innovation.