“Welcome to the embodied past of the virtual future! This book contains two essays written in the 1990s, when the Internet was just becoming an essential element of everyday life. Today, for us, citizens of a post-industrial society, it is so natural to exchange information via a computer network with people anywhere in the world that we don’t even think about it. For twenty-year-old students at the University of Westminster, where I teach, the Web is something that has always been there. This generation cannot imagine how their parents managed to communicate and work, shop and engage in politics without computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.”