Yet, even in areas where the nearest telephone is a day’s walk away, satellite technology may well have made TV available. In many relatively remote destinations, at least the ones popular with tourists, the rise of the Internet cafés has been nothing less than astonishing. Indeed, while it would be unwise to overestimate the rate of change, or to assume that changes are uniform across continents or cultures, it seems that there really is something interesting going on.

The Open University course Social Science In Action teaches the fundamentals of social science research, based around the topic of the Information Society.