Introduction: Legislating for the Digital Reality: A Moving Target

In this day and age, it has become difficult to speak of technical development without repeating any of the circulating clichés. It has become customary to mention it in the context of recent years as being accelerated, unprecedented, even racing; the same goes for buzz words such as the ‘digital reality’, ‘digital age’, ‘digital revolution’, ‘age of communication’, etc. I am certainly just as guilty of their use in this work for they are more than just empty slogans; if anything, I see them as an attempt at reasoning with, and defining the nature and dynamics of a relatively new period in human history brought about by the penetration of our lives by computing devices and high-speed connectivity. Whether the technological shift can indeed be said to represent actual progress is in itself a matter for debate; it could be said, to paraphrase Michael Crichton, with all the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors it still takes just as long to clean the house as it did in the 1930s. Be it or not progress indeed, some three decades ago humanity entered a new era, one that would certainly pose a challenge to legislation as we know it, the full extent of which we may not yet fully realize.