IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 73

created fundamental social problems. The knowledge of agriculture
replaced hunter-gatherer societies
with fixed communities with permanent borders. That allowed the
exploitation of others' labor, and
created permanent social classes
because people could not easily
leave their physical location. The
knowledge of industrialization
replaced blood-based communities with work-based communities.
That created merit-based societies with conditional acceptance
and rejection of those who could
not perform, leading to work as
the basis of identity and personal
value, and decreasing emphasis on
family and child rearing. It created
the constant risk of losing one's
community identification when one
cannot perform adequately, leading to loneliness, depression, and
anxiety related illnesses. A digital
economy is replacing work-based
communities, with interest- and
lifestyle-based virtual communities
connected by communication technologies. That leads to individuals being the social and economic
unit, with memberships in many
ephemeral communities. This is
likely to be the age of pretense
and opportunism with no sense
of permanence or enduring relationships. Individuals are likely to
assume many identities with dif-

LeaDInG eDGe

ferent personalities during their
lifetime, and even simultaneously.
These fractured personalities are
likely to lead to a crisis of trust
and reliability, and consequently a
plethora of cognitive illnesses such
as attention deficit disorder, paranoia, and schizophrenia [12].
The solutions require enhancing
virtual communities with physical
qualities such as economic cooperation, resource sharing such as
housing, food, and sex, cooperative
child rearing, and joint vacations.
Enforcing community principles
and lifestyles may create a sense
of identity and permanence that
transcends the virtual world and
spills over to the physical world [2].

References

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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