Technology's global village fragments community life: Transportation and communications technologies widen human horizons but splinter human relationships; computer networks could reverse this trend

Two hundred years ago, when the United States Constitution was drafted, 90 percent of all work was organized through face-to-face relationships, mostly within the community and family. Small farms predominated. Artisans, working autonomously in their scattered homes and local communities, produced at their own pace, selling not their labor, but a finished product. Since then, the continuing industrial revolution has brought extraordinary increases in productivity to our society, but also a new impersonal scale and a tendency toward economic and political centralization.