The Internet E-commerce and globalization are making a new economic age possible. In the future, capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on 【小题1】 relationships, contractual arrangements and access rights.

Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportion to all the new Internet and business-to-business Internet services being introduced into our lives? I have asked this question of hundreds of CEOs and corporate executives in Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, “No, quiet 【小题2】.” They say they are working longer hours, feel more stressed, are more impatient, and are even less civil in their dealings with colleagues and friends-not to mention strangers. And what’s more revealing, they place much of the blame on the very same technologies they are so 【小题3】 supporting.

The technological leader promised us that access would make life more convenient. Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to 【小题4】 us have begun to enslave us in a web of connections from which there seems to be no easy 【小题5】.

If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast 【小题6】 land, the .com generation, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. Every spare moment of our time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the 【小题7】 of all resources.

And while we have created every kind of labor-and time-saving device to service our needs, we are beginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history. Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really 【小题8】 in the e-economy age. If this new technology 【小题9】 is only about super efficiency, then we risk losing something even precious than time-our sense of what it means to be a(n) 【小题10】 human being.