Contemporary social conditions in Anglophone and Western European societies are markedly different to those of some four decades ago. Stability - even though that had only ever been relative - has given way to instability; homogeneity has given way to often radical diversity; permanence has given way to provisionality, a condition in which crucial characteristics of the environments of communication may vary from one moment to the next. Attempts to answer the questions ‘why?’ and ‘why now?’ have to look at the many factors, distinct yet everywhere connected, which still are sweeping the world. The short-hand term ‘globalization’ gathers up some of these: conditions which make it usual for the characteristics of one place to be present and active in another, economically, culturally, technologically. In the contestation of (features of) local practices, forms and traditions with those from outside, both are transformed, in ways dependent on dispositions of power in the local site. The results in any one environment are social, cultural and semiotic instability and provisionality.