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 year is of course 1998. 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 -- and it works in two ways.