Despite the liberating potential of the personal computer, information was flowing away from the person with the machine on their desk and up to the man - as it usually was - who owned it.

But his choleric conclusions can stand as a warning to those tempted to over-romanticize the liberating potential of cyberspace.

But now he discovered the liberating potential of physical accident.

The writers - with similar political perspectives, beliefs about language, and faith in the liberating potential of literature - were eager to meet one another.

Others, though, are not so sure about placing too much value on technology's liberating potential.

In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.

It is a reminder of what was once thought to be the liberating potential of the drug culture and of what eventually turned into today's nightmare.

Writers on theatre sometimes refer to the "liberating" potential of masks.

A book on the liberating potential of adultery, Dalma Heyn's "Erotic Silence of the American Wife," was published a few years ago.

We are well aware of its liberating potential in women's lives and of the important contributions it can make to global prosperity and peace.