Anxiety makes people long for a rational, certain future.
It increases when profound changes uproot traditional values. For a hundred years now, the most spectacular transformations of society have had technological bases, which makes it tempting to predict a future controlled by technology itself. At present the vision is represented by telematics and finds expression in contradictory illusions. In 1978, Simon Nora and Alain Minc co-authored The Computerization of Society, a report to the President of France. Nora and Minc coined the term telematique or telematics in this seminal work to emphasize the growing convergence of computing and communications technologies.