For Sally Davis, this accessibility is sometimes an advantage; she can email her employees at 8 o’clock at night and expects to reach them. But, as her daughter points out a ‘holiday’ is not really a holiday, it is often just a different place where Mummy brings her computer and works. So, while ICTs may provide some freedom within her public life: Sally can travel where she needs to and yet is always on hand, they may also intrude upon her private life: holidays cease being holidays.

Thinking about this in a slightly different way, we might start to ask whether there is increasing evidence of an erosion of the boundary between what we might think of as our ‘public’ life and our ‘private’ life. Looking at Sally’s day, even a trip to the hairdressers is filled with time online, rather than the conventional chat about holiday plans.

But what about Steve Apted? His latest brush with new technology, it seems, is part of a programme to reduce his workload - and to decrease the time he has to spend travelling. If he doesn’t approach and negotiate with, say, half a dozen suppliers, on an individual, face-to-face, basis then, as he points out, the process of choosing a supplier, that might ‘have taken weeks or months’, can now be resolved in ‘an hour’. There is, however, more to this scenario as well.

Ultimately, what Steve is interested in ...