Faster and smaller computers can make it easier for people to access information in a wider variety of places. Richer display devices can help people communicate more readily with computerized systems through pictures and text. The utopian and antiutopian genres of social analysis are about 500 years old and predate the social sciences by about 350 years. A different set of investigative strategies and genres is based on examining existing computerized systems as they are used in real social settings. Reading from paper is superior to reading from displays, which are too grainy.
Technology often moves faster than society is prepared to deal with the changes.
In 1993 a historical turning point occurred as both the Internet and multimedia entered the mainstream of American life. The impending changes in scholarly publications are caused by the confluence of two trends. The digitalization of the scholarly word appears inevitable, but the timing is uncertain. Modifying a culture is far more difficult than innovating with technology. At any rate, the advent of electronic publishing offers a marvelous opportunity to reexamine some of the latent assumptions of the present research system.