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132 Steve Woolgarcommon assumptions about the privacy impacts of new technologies at work,especially in those literatures influenced by the labor process tradition. Insteadof starting with the assumption that relations between management andemployees are intrinsically oppositional, Mason et al. stress the importance ofexamining the actual usage and experience of new technologies in complexsocial situations.Rule 3 Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for realactivitiesOur research showed that the virtual tends to sit alongside the real which, inmuch of the popular imagination, it is usually supposed to supplant. Thus,against the prospects for “virtual learning” (one part of the vision of “virtualuniversities”), our research found that the mere ability of students to accessICT failed to re-mediate the communal dimensions of learning (for example,Crook and Light, 2002); that virtual social life provides a further dimension toa person’s real social life, not a substitution for it (for example, Nettleton et al.,2002); and that sources of virtual support via the Internet were used togetherwith other resources and became enmeshed into people’s social lives, in somecases thereby transcending the boundaries of real and virtual life.Rule 4 The more virtual the more real!This rule is an extension of the previous one. Not only do new virtual activitiessit alongside existing “real” activities, but the introduction and use of new“virtual” technologies can actually stimulate more of the corresponding “real”activity. The Virtual Society? research documents the interplay of real andvirtual connectivity (for example, Wittel et al., 2002, on the new media sectorin London’s “silicon alley”) and the ways in which e-mail generates more realmeetings, and even meetings to resolve disputes generated by e-mail communication(Brown and Lightfoot, 2002). This rule has important implications forbusiness practice, specifically for the claim that networking computing canfundamentally change the nature and management of organizational memory.Rule 5 The more global the more local!Virtual technologies are famously implicated in the much-discussed phenomenonof globalization. In one of many possible interpretations of the term, globalizationmeans the rapid movement and spread of symbolic and financialcapital. Electronic technologies facilitate the rapid traffic in communication, theinstantiation of activities and institutions at widespread locales, and the insinuationof standardized identities and imagery (especially brands) in multiple