New technologies is a historically relative term.
We are not the first generation to wonder at the rapid and extraordinary shifts in the dimension of the world and the human relationships it contains as a result of new forms of communication, or to be surprised by the changes those shifts occasion in the regular pattern of our lives. The future of cyberspace, therefore, will be determined not only through the invention of new hardware and software but also through the names we employ to describe it. What cyberspace becomes will, to a great extent, depend upon whatwe call it. Technologies of the nation. These are all ways in which the themes to this special issue are taken up either by contemporary theorists or by those who have influenced contemporary theorists.