ABSTRACT
The propensity to personal and social reinvention goes back to the earliest days of our national experience. In sum, a lifetime that stretched from 1750 to 1820 would have undergone a sequence of three radically different ways of defining what society was about, three ways of defining who a person was and where a person stood in the larger order of things. Since the middle 19th century, episodes of person and social transformation have focused as much upon people's relationship to technological systems as they have to political institutions. The opportunities and challenges presented by digital liquification have generated great waves of enthusiasm. Entrepreneurs are busily at work creating new products and services. As the 20th century draws to a close, it is evident that, for better or worse, the future of computing and the future of human relations – indeed, of human being itself – are now thoroughly intertwined.
