ICTs and Accessibility: An Action Space Perspective on the Impact of New Information and Communication Technologies

Personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet are conquering the world apace. A few figures will illustrate this. Mokhtarian (1998) estimates that, at present, about 6 percent of the American workforce is telecommuting, while Nilles (1995) forecasts that, in the year 2020, 60 million American full-time employees will telecommute full-time or part-time. In 2001, the revenues of worldwide e-commerce were US$ 400 billions, probably 20 percent of which can be classified as business-to-consumer traffic. The revenue in the year 2003 is estimated at US$ 1.3 trillion (Golob and Regan 2001). Viswanathan and Goulias (2001) expect 15 percent to 20 percent of all shopping in 2010 in the USA to be labelled as e-commerce. These developments are being equipped technologically by faster and cheaper microchips, increased transmission speeds on the Internet, growth in the number of web pages on the Internet, small and portable wireless equipment, and so forth, (Golob and Regan 2001).