For those actively involved with the new technologies, there is a growing awareness that we have moved and are in a new place that provides new capabilities, opportunities, and experiences. Media, like walls and windows, can hide and they can reveal.
Media can create a sense of sharing and belonging or a feeling of exclusion and isolation.
Places and media both foster set patterns of interaction among people, set patterns of social information flow. Thus, while places create one type of information-system the live encounter there are many other types of situations created by other channels of communication. This wider view of situations as information-systems, rather than as places, is especially relevant to the study of electronic media because electronic media have tended to diminish the differences between live and mediated interaction. The speech and appearance of others are now accessible without being in the same physical location. The widespread use of electronic media leads to many new social situations.