There was a time when cars and planes had not yet been invented; a time when roads had not been built or their use forgotten. There were times when reading was for the few, and writing for the fewer. There was a time without science, days without warmth, years without harvest, and illnesses without cure. And we wonder at the lives of our forbears that must have been nasty, brutish and short.

This might be a simplistic view of history, but generally speaking this is the Whiggish view of progress from the wrong end: the past as seen from the point of view of the present.

Debates about the first commercial flight must have been quite harsh. Not everyone would have agreed, 100 years ago, that flying would be the quickest and cheapest way for almost everyone to hop around the globe.

Many were suspicious that flying was too dangerous and very few would be able to afford it. If humans were meant to fly, some of them said, we would have been born with wings! Now all of us fly, to work, to study, to visit friends and family or to visit distant lands for the sheer pleasure of it. Flying has become part of our lives.

Today we live, feeling as if we are at the end of a long, harsh line of deprivation, and the comforts of our life feel almost unsurpassable. Yet all of us have lived through the onset of Internet, and few of us are too young to remember how the power now carried in the pockets of our mobile phone-wielding grandmothers could only be afforded by banks and governments in their vast machine-filled vaults.

The new technologies are the unstoppable continuation of the story of change in the way we live. Changes will be as unimaginable as flight was a century ago, or Internet was a decade and a half ago. Most of us will be as sceptical of the change as those wing-fearing landlubbers of old or the few around us who still stubbornly dismiss the use of computers in favour of the older ways of research, work and entertainment.

That scepticism must be defeated. Malta will become an information society when technologies cease to hold a wonder of their own but rather are transformed in everyday applications that we barely become aware of.

The best contemporary example of this revolution is the mobile phone, transformed from a suspicious and expensive luxury good to the most important vehicle of communication in our lives, second only to face-to-face conversation (which is as it should be).

Using the mobile phone to find out if your restaurant reservation is still on, and if your baby-sitter will be on time, is only a step away from using whatever the mobile device of next year will be called to find if parking is at all available at your destination, or if a bus ride is more feasible; finding out what cinema or theatre or music or dancing options you have tonight, booking them, and paying them, while you're still on the bus on the way to the city.

Tourists visiting us would surely find a good use for these services. For as long as we are ahead of others, and our present is the future of others, Malta will not only be a great place to live in but also a great place to visit.

Being competitive in tourism is equivalent to having something others don't. To manage that you have to fly, before others become convinced that flying is even a good idea.

This is one of the 13 objectives of the National ICT Strategy for the coming three years. Anyone wishing to learn more can download a complete copy of the strategy from www.miti.gov.mt.