ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how historical changes in societies including changes in media forms have influenced the way people experience selfhood. It discusses how current and quickly evolving forms of electronic media create new opportunities for self-expression. The human predicament is to live inside circumstances of many sorts. It generally emphasizes that how people experience selfhood as a matter of cross-cultural and historical variation. Furthermore, communities and regions of a society vary, as do social institutions, such as the family, economy, religion, and polity. In other words, societies do not march into the future in a resolute, integrated, and consistent way. If there was little occupational specialization, so there was little geographical mobility. Ceremonial occasions also were opportunities for individual persons to display publicly their own commitments to those traditions. However, European societies did experience a series of changes that manifested themselves as new forms of social and cultural organization.
