The modern democratic system, in other words, was born not just from high ideals and revolutionary political theory, but also from the logic of social organization dictated by the Industrial Revolution. Government was organized along lines similar to other social sectors. This is important to remember when we look at e-government. Attempting to examine e-government without a clear understanding of the surrounding environment is a limited endeavor at best. E-government is not something that can be defined by service delivery and methods of operation alone.
Social context is all-important.
More than 25 years ago, Ferkiss argued that the key to understanding the changes of modern society lay in the fact that communication, in the broadest sense of the word, was replacing work as the foundation of the technological system. Energy was still utilized, but increasingly it was used to affect states of consciousness rather than to move or change physical objects. Electronics rather than mechanical physics reigned supreme. Since then we have come to understand this shift far more clearly. Electronic information and knowledge, particularly in the form of computer-based network communication, have become the central elements around which our society is increasingly organized.