Globalisation, Technology and Community

Abstract

Much of the discussion around community and information technologies has related to two key themes which have emerged in common discourse over the last forty years or so in the West. The first of these is constructed around the belief that Western societies are collectively in crisis. The increasing reliance of Western societies on intelligence-led production and the service economy rather than the manufacturing of material goods to create economic wealth, it is mooted, has altered our collective mindset and changed our ways of being and of thinking. This adjustment to a post-industrial landscape of employment and the subsequent restructuring of Western economies, it is argued, have fractured traditional social relations and required that we build new ways of living which are less dependent on the support of extended kinship groups and neighbourhood and more focused on the individual and their immediate family group. The second theme is constructed around the amazing progress that has been made in the development and application of technology in society over the past century in particular and the profound impacts which this has had on the nature of social relationships in the West.