c publication. Yet quantitative change can sometimes lead to qualitative change. This realization, coupled with the rapid rate of change and innovation on the Internet, has prompted some commentators to argue we are witnessing revolutionary changes in the form and content of scholarly communication. Others sound the death knell for traditional publication efforts (Ginsparg, 1994; Odlyzko, 1994) and some even predict and proselytize for the emergence of a new, qualitatively different form of scholarly communication (Harnad, 1991). (45)It is difficult for me to read these commentators without a certain incredulity. Have not we heard this all before in the writings of Evans (1979) Toffler (1980; 1990), Levy (1980) or Naisbitt (1982). Is there some reason why we choose to uncritically accept the myth of the information society and the dream of limitless wealth and ease proposed by Bell's (1973) classic analysis of the shift from goods to a information producing service economy. Well if the truth be told, sociologists and some others generally don't accept these myths (Noble, 1979; Menzies, 1981: 1882; Siegal and Markoff, 1985; Traber, 1986; Cockburn, 1988; Lyon, 1988; Mosco, 1989; Schumacker, 1973; Hayes, 1990; Schenk and Anderson, 1995). Instead, our preference has been to mount critical assaults on the millenial type predictions normally associated with discourse on information technology. We are not, in the words of Rothschild (1993) advocaters of the "tech-fix." There is certainly a potential ugliness about information technology that isn't being considered in the extant literature on electronic publication. We don't have to go far afield to find it. Boyett and Conn (1990), for example, describe in loving terms the lean, mean aggressive and panoptic workplace made possible by the new information technologies. They paint a picture of an environment "revolutionized" by information technology beyond recognition. Their workplace 2000 has fe...
