USA Today on December 31, 1998 carried an interesting article, "Birth of a New Order",
talking about the year that world's lines of time and space
collapsed. The most incisive paragraphs are excerpted below:
The global, time-crunched market driven by electronic information
"forces things to get bigger and smaller at the same time," says
Nicholas Negroponte, author and technologist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. "And that's so ironic, when things
want to do both but not stay in the middle. There will be an
increasing absence of things that aren't either very local
or very global". Oil and cars aren't much suited to
being small and local. So they're moving to become gigantic and
cross-border.
As for being small and local, that's where the Internet, or
World Wide Web, comes in.
WWW and mobile computing have changed the landscape
entirely.