The power of institutions to provide support is also the power to patronise. Inequalities do not generally increase significantly, but the poor find that their lives are more thoroughly policed than previously and that institutional support is conditional upon behaving in an approved way. It is not only the poor who are constrained, however. It is a world in which the new establishment, starved of vibrant debate and argument, is in danger of stagnating in its own smugness. Increasingly hard to know how reliable information is.
Information technologies combine with other new technologies to sweep away existing institutions.
Individual access to ever more global information. Individuals go to trusted sources who are responsible for checking information. New technologies assist re-vamped major institutions in achieving their objectives. New power structures in politics, in business and in community life Transient networks and shifting partnerships. Weakening of national government Radically modernised, but stable, organisations National government remains the focus of politics.