Today - fifty and more years, as well as a world war, later - a recurring discovery of simultaneity can be detected. There is no lack of protagonists seeking to celebrate each latest generation of telecommunication technologies as a revolution' and promising a fresh liberation of human beings through the merging of space and time, of workplace, working hours, free time and home. In contrast to the beginning of this century, however, when millions of people noted with astonishment the marvels of technology, which immensely stimulated their imagination but only gradually impinged on their own lives, today almost everyone has become involved or at least potentially affected. What was then reserved for a few privileged people has risen, in industrialized countries at least, to a general standard. In the USA in the last ten years alone the share of investments by firms in the purchase of information technologies like computers, telecommunications systems and equipment has doubled from 20 to 40 per cent, as the Office of Technology Assessment notes in its report on the situation of American industry.12 Other countries are following suit at appropriate intervals. In the Third World, coups d'état have been prepared with the aid of transistor radios, and the television aerials on the tin roofs of slums have become proverbial. The global village of which one of the early enthusiasts of the approaching age of information, Marshall McLuhan, wrote as early as the sixties, in which there would be no shortage of possibilities of communication, seems to have been turned into a reality.
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The Illusion of Simultaneity