The Future of Community and Personal Identity in the Coming Electronic Culture

Book excerpt: The 1994 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology began as a look at the changing nature of the home. In building scenarios of the "new home," the participants expressed many significant insights into issues of personal identity, community-building, and setting boundaries in our lives and environments. This report captures many of those insights and observations. It is intended to be a catalyst for readers to understand the consequences of the trends in communications and information technologies, to think more about these issues, and to consider appropriate new actions to take as individuals, as workers, and as citizens to have better lives and communities. The report first concentrates on the impact that electronic networks might have on the future of communities, geographical and virtual. A second major theme explored is that of changes in personal identity occasioned by electronic networking in both the physical spaces of home and geographical community, on the one hand, and the virtual communities called MUDs ("Multi-User Domain") and MOOs (MUDs using Object-Oriented computer code), on the other. A third area of focus is that of the changing nature of intermediaries in democratic societies. The areas of public policy that are ripe for review are described in the last section of the report. A paper entitled, "The New Intermediaries" (Charles M. Firestone), and a list of conference participants are appended. (MAS)