Telecommunications is just one of the means by which people communicate and, as such, we need to look at telecommunications and any other communications technologies within the wider context of human communication activity. Early findings show that many people are uneasy and even fearful of information technology by avoiding it or by using it in minimal ways. To obtain this type of data we have spent time with individuals, watching how they communicate where they get confused, what they don't understand and the many mistakes they make. You can do this type of research yourself in an informal way. Just watch someone at the desk next to you trying to use a phone or trying to fill in a form. What you will quickly notice about people on the phone is that they use very few of the buttons available on the keypad, and they get quite anxious if they have to use any buttons outside their normal ones. Most will not use the instruction book, and those that do will not necessarily have a rewarding experience. Watch someone fill out a form--a good meaty one such as an application form. or a tax form--and you will see a similar pattern of distressed behavior. The simple fact we can all observe from how people use these ordinary instruments of everyday communication is how messy, uncertain and confusing the experience can be. Now multiply these individual close encounters of the communicative kind to take account of the full range you may experience in a single day, from getting up in the morning until you go to bed at night and the world takes on a slightly different appearance. Even watching television which for many provides an antidote to the daily confusion is itself fraught with a kind of low level confusion. For example, if you ring people up five minutes after the evening news has finished and ask them what the news was about, many cannot remember, and those who do remember get some of it wrong. One of the reasons why this obvious confusion gone unnoticed is because 'communication' is a word we associate with success, and therefore we expect the process to work effectively most of the time. To suggest otherwise is to challenge one of our society's most deeply held beliefs. How do scientists know many people are uneasy about information technology?