The use of electronic media to support scientific communication is one of the major shifts in the practice of science in this era. There are other shifts the science system, such as the rise of global science, the rise of biological sciences, the plateauing of support for mega-science projects after the end of the cold war. There are interdependencies in these shifts, since electronic communication media can often expedite special kinds of communications between scientists who work across continents and 10-15 time zones while reducing the marginal costs of communication. In the scientific communities, these communications include informal e-mail, the communication of conference programs as they jell, the sharing of preprints, access to electronic versions of journal articles, and the development of shared disciplinary corpuses. Today, the Internet is the primary medium of this communication. In North America, public access to the Internet has become the occasion for both discourse about and changes in ways of doing business, forms of entertainment, communication within families, and so on. As a consequence, the shift towards using electronic media as a major communication medium seems to be an inescapable imperative. The concept of an inescapable imperative has not become popular as a finding of scientific research; it is popular because it fits simple cultural models of computerization and because it is advanced in many important forums.