The British academic and Assistant Director General of UNESCO Richard Hoggart explores the concepts of communication in his Reith lecture series entitled 'Only connect'. In this lecture entitled 'Common Ground', Richard Hoggart evaluates the role of passing information to each other via a system of communication. He asks, now that we have developed at an almost unbelievable speed, what happens next? Are we really more in touch now than previously? How will new technologies bring us closer? Centralised mass societies are keen to show they understand the human scale but can human societies remember to interact with each other in a fundamentally kind and moral way?