This paper looks at the role of modern information and communication technologies, and their impact on education, from two distinct perspectives. The first is the classic perspective of how they can be used directly in support of educational goals and strategies. However, the exponential growth of the media and information technologies, especially the computer, as a prime vector in social organization and behavior also implies another level of analysis. Increasingly the media have become a major, in some societies a dominant, source of information and an educational determinant, at times explicitly, more often implicitly. This second perspective leads the researcher to draw some conclusions on the relationship between communication technology and concepts of literacy, and the need for educators to be fully aware of communication processes. The paper focuses on developing countries, but necessarily must do so from a base of technology with its origins in the industrialized world. Whatever promise the new technologies may have, this is invariably subject to constraints of a cultural, economic, social, or psychological nature, which have to be realistically acknowledged. There is a tension between the opportunities of technology, that are themselves constantly shifting, and the conditions attached to their application, the ability of the sustaining social, educational, and management system to accommodate technology at a particular level of performance. In principal the particular opportunities offered by information and communication technologies to sustain educational processes offer: (1) outreach; (2) economies of scale; (3) richness of illustration and visualization; and (4) individualization. A diagram relates technology types and processes in a single matrix. (DK)