The background to this book is the climate of increasingly sophisticated technology that seems to be having an ever greater impact on our daily lives. In medicine, at work, in leisure, in politics we are noticing more and more the encroaching influence of computers, telecommunications and miniaturisation. Our phone systems, which remained relatively static for 60 years, are now the means by which we can send and receive words, moving pictures and sound internationally. Television, which also developed at a fairly slow rate between the 1950s and the 1980s, has exploded in complexity within a few years such that we now have access to hundreds of services, with.
