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Access to a global community

Historically the Internet has provided an electronic community transcending national boundaries. This has been of particular use to academics who, because of their high degree of subject specialization, frequently find that their only peers are located at a considerable physical remove, often in a separate university and sometimes on the other side of the planet. The Net also permits even those with very severe physical disabilities to communicate on a completely equal footing, allowing them to conceal their disability completely if they so desire. For some disabled people this may be the first experience they ever have of people responding to them rather than to their disability, and as such can be very liberating. For those who are house-bound it can provide a means of communicating with the outside world, and to some extent alleviate their isolation. The fall in the cost of computer and telecommunications hardware, along with increased ease of access to the Net, is resulting in a dramatic increase in the size of this electronic community. The Web is further fuelling this trend. It has caught the public imagination, being seen in many quarters as the universal, user-friendly front-end to the Internet and as a tangible manifestation of the Clinton administration's idea of an Information Superhighway.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.